A remarkable North Carolina newspaper notice from 1815 described an important first: public chemistry experiments by young women students attending the Raleigh Academy. The single-sentence notice caught the attention of an astute scholar, Kim Tolley, who recognized its significance for the history of science education in the United States. But the brief pronouncement also presented intriguing mysteries: Who was this “Miss Nye” leading praiseworthy chemistry experiments at the North Carolina State House, of all places? Could an academy located in the American South truly be at the forefront of science education for girls? Fortunately, Tolley grasped both the significance of the favorable notice and the many questions it still begged. Her most recent book, Heading South to Teach, unravels the mysteries behind “Miss Nye” and her students’ unprecedented public science experiments. Yet Tolley's study does substantially more: it offers new understandings of women's aspirations and opportunities in the first half of the nineteenth century and provides fresh insight into American religion and sectionalism before the Civil War. In Tolley's capable hands, the history of education is more than a special lens through which to examine the history of women and religion. Heading South to Teach makes young people's education a prime force in US history.

First and foremost, Heading South to Teach presents a close biography of Susan Nye Hutchison (1790–1867), drawing from Hutchison's personal journals between 1815 and 1840. During these twenty-five years, Susan Nye left her home state of New York to teach in North Carolina and Georgia, and she went on to found several independent academies for girls and young women in the South. Nye's career as an educator might have ended with marriage and motherhood (she raised four sons and parented two step-daughters), but her husband, Adam Hutchison, proved abusive and reckless. Out of necessity, Susan Nye Hutchison became the family's breadwinner and a single parent. By 1833, the pair had separated, with the formal assent and support of Susan's Presbyterian church, and Adam died shortly after. Though Susan briefly fell back on her family in New York for assistance, she returned to Raleigh in 1835 and remained in North Carolina for another dozen years, superintending her own schools. By 1848, Hutchison had settled back in Amenia, the small town of her birth, where she enjoyed financial stability built through her many years as a professional woman. The seven chapters in Tolley's book are both chronologically and thematically arranged, linking the major events of Hutchison's life before 1840 to key historical developments, including mass evangelization during the Second Great Awakening, growing sectionalism between North and South over the moral problem of slavery, and women's struggles for educational equality, personal attainment, and economic security, even as a powerful proscriptive literature militated against such basic aspirations.

Hutchison's journals are not complete for her years in the South, but Tolley is an intrepid researcher, supplementing the extant entries with evidence from myriad sources: newspapers, school records, family papers, church and court documents, legislative proceedings, and more. In the course of her research, Tolley discovered other important “firsts” for Susan Nye Hutchison beyond the public science experiments in 1815: she published two substantial texts on slavery and the churches and one forward-looking treatise on women's education. Tolley labels these “protofeminist” in their distinctive view of women's full intellectual equality and their insistence “that women could make meaningful contributions in the world” (pp. 175, 173).

While Tolley labels her book a “microhistory” for its close attention to one woman's unusual life, Heading South to Teach consistently situates Hutchison's beliefs and actions within a larger context (p. 11). Tolley proves a dexterous historian. Personal journals can be quite difficult to work with as primary sources, since the quotidian and the consequential are often jumbled together indiscriminately. Yet Tolley discerns small moments of great import within Hutchison's journal, and she moves judiciously between immediate events and broad themes. For example, in early 1837, Hutchison expressed regret for having attempted to write an appeal to female members of the Presbyterian Church to avoid a division in the church over slavery. “My ambition has been a sin,” Hutchison privately confessed, manifesting her era's discomfort with women's aspirations to worldly authority (p. 172). Her argument “that women's influence could heal the rupture in the church” looks radical, though, if read alongside Catharine Beecher's more famous warning for women to steer clear of the nation's slavery debates (p. 173). Beecher's injunction was published the same year as Hutchison's almost five-thousand-word impassioned treatise, but Tolley is the first scholar to recover her work and its import. Beyond the immediate context of church divisions in the late 1830s, growing sectional antipathy over the moral problem of slavery informs Tolley's discussion. All this inflected, of course, by Hutchison's gender: “Susan's essay is the only known published writing by a woman arguing against the impending division in the Presbyterian Church,” Tolley writes (p. 172). Heading South to Teach moves smoothly between these complex sources, contexts, and themes.

Because of Tolley's contextual reach, important arguments may be drawn from her examination of Hutchison's life. First, Tolley demonstrates that the so-called “cult of domesticity” of the nineteenth century, which prescribed strict roles and spheres of activity along fixed lines of gender, clashed at times with an “educational transformation” taking place in the early republic and antebellum eras (p. 188). By the time she left the South in the late 1840s, Hutchison had built a strong reputation as a superintendent of rigorous schools for girls, with innovative curricula and sustained inquiry into higher-order math and science. The founder of several academies—one even incorporated by the state of North Carolina at her behest—Hutchison gained a sense of her own capacity and potential influence. “Historians have rarely credited antebellum women with career ambitions,” and yet Hutchison grew from a “modest and retiring young teacher to [a] mature and ambitious career woman” (p. 189). Her own extreme impoverishment over several long stretches, along with single parenthood, gave her a special vantage too, impelling her to see education as a means “to fit [girls] for any situation in life to which they may hereafter be called,” as she wrote in 1835 (p. 138). Second, Tolley reveals the close, even inseparable, relationship between educational institutions and churches founded in the midst of the Second Great Awakening. Converted to her evangelical faith via revival, Hutchison acted the part of a lay minister to her students and the communities in which she lived. “Called” to teach in the religious sense of that word, “educational entrepreneur[s]” like Hutchison enjoyed strong support from evangelical churches, whose members also fostered a swift rise in the number of schools employing women (pp. 24, 6). Third, Tolley recovers the moral dilemmas northern white evangelicals like Hutchison confronted in the slave South: inspired to evangelize among free and enslaved African Americans, Hutchison ran up against an increasingly hard-line view of slavery. Hardly a radical here, Hutchison adhered to (and taught her students) a view of slavery as a moral wrong requiring slow and careful undoing. Over time, even this gradualist view fell out of favor with masters demanding permanent legal protection for slavery, which they now characterized as a Bible-sanctioned institution. Hutchison found herself with little room to maneuver, and rather than risk legal sanction for reading with enslaved peoples (as she did secretly in the late 1830s), she left the South permanently. Through all of these substantial considerations, Tolley offers a beautifully crafted history with rich insights into the ways pursuits of education worked against rigid and debilitating proscriptions on women's lives.