| This thesis addresses the relational adolescent development of three girls educated in early, nineteenth-century Massachusetts, as revealed through their diaries, Relational adolescent development, based on the theoretical framework of Carol Gilligan and colleagues, refers to the patterns of strategies elected by girls to mediate their personal relationships and their educational experiences. Educational experiences refers to: formal experiences within schools and classroom; semiformal experiences including both didactic and socializing experiences; and, personal learning activities such as reading. The central question of the thesis is: how adolescent girl diarists reveal, over time, their understanding of education and their relationships within families and communities, including evaluations of their own growth in learning and character.;The girls are from uniquely prosperous Massachusetts families: Sarah Connell Ayer, Newburyport; Anna Cabot Lowell, Roxbury; and, Louisa May Alcott, Concord. The diaries are rich, sustained texts which cover at least six years of adolescence. The learning and relationship experiences of these girls challenge the historical definitions of adolescence as a time devoted to apprenticeships and career choice. Harvey Graff's historical scholarship on American youth suggests that of the four paths available to adolescents, girls were restricted to one path based solely on gender. The girls from these families do not fit neatly into the traditional, transition, or emerging sub-paths which current scholarship suggests were available to them. Instead, the diarial evidence suggests an experience of adolescent development that is driven, in part, by a girl's ability to mediate the interaction between learning (what they know) and relationship (who they are learning from). Central to this mediation is their personal engagement with what they know and how they feel about themselves as girls, and what they believe are cultural expectations for them as young women. Their patterns of development suggest that their experience of adolescence was unique to them both as adolescents and as girls. This dissertation takes seriously the subjectivity of three adolescent girls who strove heartfully to become educated good women in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. |
