| This thesis distinguishes two traditions that shaped women's higher education in western New York and the upper Midwest between 1760 and 1861. The first tradition taught genteel manners and accomplishments to elite, urban women; the second taught rigorous studies to rural boys and girls in coeducational academies. Both traditions persisted throughout this century---wealthy merchants and professionals supported an advanced curriculum at women's seminaries, while evangelical denominations with primarily rural congregations opened advanced, coeducational seminaries. The former emphasized feminine gentility and belles lettres, the latter useful, non-classical courses suited to children of farmers and artisans.; The rural, coeducational tradition provided the institutional model for coeducational land grant universities in the Midwest. In the 1830s, evangelists developed a three-year, English and scientific course more advanced than secondary schools yet subordinate to colleges. Offering these curricula in institutions they called "seminaries," these three year courses became the principal form of advanced education in the Midwest in the 1840s and 1850s. However, neither fashionable female seminaries nor practical coeducational seminaries admitted African-Americans, education continued to confer social authority that whites deemed inappropriate to freemen and women. Racism in the rural North and southern efforts to impede literacy among slaves in the South, made education a principal strategy in maintaining white privilege in the antebellum period.; Rural seminaries became keystone institutions in the establishment of new towns on the midwestern prairies by the 1850s. Town boosters and speculators allied themselves with rural and minor denominations to elevate local seminaries into colleges. More concerned with the needs of early settlers than upholding an all-male tradition of colleges, they readily admitted women to their college departments. Between 1853 and 1861, twenty-nine coeducational colleges were chartered, most often when coeducational seminaries added college departments. Coeducation defied the emerging urban ideology of domesticity. Its ubiquity at rural seminaries demonstrates that domesticity was not the principal determinant of gender roles and relationships for rural midwestern women before 1861. Rural women in the 1850s who encountered gentility at seminaries adopted it selectively while maintaining a distinct, Western, rural perspective on their expanding roles and opportunities. |
