In Pursuit of Knowledge. Kabria Baumgartner

      FIGURE 1.2. This portrait of Prudence Crandall (1803–1890) was painted by Francis Alexander in 1834. Prudence was a white abolitionist from Rhode Island and the proprietor of the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

      The Canterbury Female Boarding School fit firmly within the tradition of the female seminary movement. This movement began in the Revolutionary era as leading white intellectuals, including Benjamin Rush and Judith Sargent Murray, raised concerns about the twin goals of forming the national character and developing a unified citizenry. These concerns helped to accelerate support for widespread schooling of both young white men and women at colleges and seminaries, respectively. In 1787 Rush, a white physician, political leader, and educator in Philadelphia, delivered a speech, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” at the Young Ladies’ Academy. He proposed a curriculum of English language and grammar, writing, bookkeeping, geography, and history to “prepare [women] for the duties of social and domestic life.”17 This proposal stressed the usefulness of a woman’s advanced learning to manage household affairs, to influence her husband, to promote the well-being of her family, and to engage in intellectual conversation. Rush and other leaders cast women as central actors in stabilizing the nation and seminaries as sites of meaning-making and cultural production.18

      From 1790 to 1860 more than 350 female seminaries and academies were founded in the United States.19 Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, a white female educator and writer, observed in 1837 that seminaries were “institutions of a permanent and elevated character” that were “fast multiplying” across the nation.20 While a few poor and working-class white female students received tuition scholarships, most of the students who attended female seminaries were twelve- to eighteen-year-old young white women from middle-class and elite families who could afford the tuition and room and board.21 Hence only a small percentage of the population could actually avail themselves of these institutions. The historian Margaret Nash asserts that female seminaries “played an [important] role in class formation and consolidation.”22 For instance, material conditions and cultural values like self-improvement and morality defined middle-class status and were often reinforced at seminaries and academies.23

      Nineteenth-century educational advocates argued that both white men and women possessed intellectual abilities in need of refinement, even though these groups would occupy different roles in the nation. The rationale for women’s pursuit of advanced education focused on notions of usefulness and intellectual growth, with gender ideology an important but not singular consideration. To be sure, proponents of female seminaries such as Rush emphasized that educated women would make good wives and mothers.24 The explosion of religious revivalism and the emergence of the market revolution further stimulated the growth of female seminaries, and the seminary movement would soon become a watershed in the history of white women’s education.25

      But like other educational movements of the day, the female seminary movement did not serve African American girls and women, a fact that angered many African American activists and their allies. In 1830 the free black population in the United States stood at 300,000, with over 40 percent located in the free states and territories of the North.26 Whether in urban areas or small towns, African Americans confronted discrimination, and the schoolhouse was no exception. Some public schools barred African American children from attending. Only a small number of African American men were admitted to colleges and universities. The female seminary fared no better. A letter on women’s education, signed by a person named Matilda and featured in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper, simultaneously praised the emerging national dialogue claiming that the mind had no sex while lamenting the fact that racial prejudice qualified the dialogue. “We possess not the advantages with those of our sex whose skins are not colored like our own,” Matilda declared.27 As the national dialogue went, the mind had no sex, but it certainly had a race.28

      Female seminaries endorsed a racialized and gendered model of republican citizenship; an unspoken requirement for admission was whiteness, apparently even before sex.29 For example, the Albany Female Seminary in New York enrolled both young white women and “small [white] boys.”30 In the early nineteenth century, coeducation at seminaries and academies was not unusual, but racial integration was.31 Hence white women applicants to seminaries and academies such as Bradford Academy in Massachusetts had to be ladies of “good character”—a seemingly amorphous category with specifically racialized assumptions about who did and did not qualify.32 So when white women attended these seminaries, they inhabited predominantly white female spaces.33

      Though called a boarding school, Prudence Crandall’s school was, for all intents and purposes, a female seminary.34 Female seminaries typically offered a three-year course of study in English language and literature, reading and composition, arithmetic, geography, history, natural and moral philosophy, and botany, as well as electives such as drawing and music. William Russell, an instructor of reading at a Massachusetts-area female seminary, extolled the virtues of this standard curriculum, which would enable a woman to “acquit herself aright, to whatever social duty she may be justly called.”35 The female seminary was thus an academically rigorous environment, and the Canterbury Female Boarding School offered all of these subjects and even added chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and French.

      In these white female spaces, racial hierarchies and boundaries were implicitly, if not explicitly, observed and maintained, especially when it came to socializing. Mary Eckert, a young white woman from a well-to-do family, penned a letter to her parents while at her aunt’s female boarding school in Washington, Pennsylvania. Mary noted the planned lecture tour by Reverend John B. Pinney, a white Presbyterian missionary who worked as an agent for the American Colonization Society. Mary recounted hearing “a lady ask . . . why our blacks should not be educated and taken into company with the whites, that she would like to see them taken into our parties.” Though it is unclear where Mary was when she heard the question, her sentiments were made clear when she recorded her thoughts on the matter: “I think that’s carrying the joke rather too far.”36 The question of whether African Americans should even be permitted at parties aside, Mary’s description of their mere presence in white spaces as a “joke” is revealing.

      The very rationale for white women’s education made the presence of African American women at female seminaries precarious, at best. As Mary Kelley argues, the female seminary encouraged young white women to “chart the nation’s course.”37 An African American woman attending a seminary demonstrated her desire and ability to improve her mind and lead a purposeful life. And allowing her to attend a seminary affirmed her legitimate inclusion within the broader project of nation-building, which conflicted with racial ideologies that refused African Americans an equal place in the nation, let alone recognized their ability to contribute to it. An African American woman’s desire for learning, as well as her capacity to learn, was thus summarily dismissed.

      Nevertheless African American families invested in and cared deeply about their children’s learning. When Prudence Crandall decided to open