During the 1839-1840 school year, Caroline Wills, a White student at Troy Female Seminary, wrote: “We look forward to that period with no small degree of dread and pleasure.”Footnote 1 Fifteen years later, Charlotte Forten, an African American student at the Higginson Grammar School for Girls, similarly noted, “The dreaded examination day is over at last, and we feel very much relieved.”Footnote 2 These glimpses of nervousness and relief reveal more than routine academic anxieties. This article argues that emotional expression served as a medium through which students reimagined their place in the world, sometimes subtly, sometimes aspirationally.Footnote 3 Even in the absence of radical social change, their emotional reflections during their schooling show how young women negotiated power, belonging, and personhood within a society filled with gendered and racial constraints. By expressing feelings—excitement, determination, and hope—these students reconceptualized possibilities for the intellectual woman.Footnote 4 White students reimagined their roles by rejecting the idea that their futures were solely defined by the duties of domesticity. African American students asserted their capability, desire, and right to intellectual and educational advancement while simultaneously revising exclusionary notions of domesticity that marginalized them and cast them as outsiders to the ideal of White, middle-class femininity.Footnote 5 Therefore, we can read both African American and White students’ schooltime writings as critiquing and rethinking the confining and exclusionary idea of domesticity.
I draw on a variety of students’ schooltime writings, a term I use to corral diaries, letters, and compositions, each of which had distinct audiences. Student compositions had a large audience, as students presented these writings to their teachers, classmates, and non-school listeners. (Women’s schools, in fact, often placed advertisements in local newspapers inviting the public to examinations, where the compositions were read out loud.) Letters had a smaller, more personalized audience, often friends and family, which allowed students to articulate their thoughts and feelings less formally. Finally, diaries were the most personal form of expression and contemplation, meant, in theory, to be for the author. Yet these private documents hold immense power, as they reveal what scholar Amy Wink calls “creative agency.” “In the intimate act of writing,” Wink argues, “women forged a written space to communicate their spiritual and intellectual strength to themselves as well as to future readers.”Footnote 6 The varied audiences for these writings reveal how students navigated and reimagined social expectations. While some writings allowed for outward critique, others facilitated more personal, intimate forms of contemplation. I contextualize these student writings within a broader primary source base—including institutional records, prescriptive literature, and speeches—to show how students’ emotions and aspirations interacted with broader cultural expectations.
This article highlights how acts of emotional expression—though not overtly rebellious—allowed young women to reconsider dominant norms. In doing so, it builds on Saidiya Hartman’s work on the everyday negotiations of power.Footnote 7 Using Hartman’s framework, I show that even small affective expressions can serve as subtle critiques of the restrictive gendered and racial expectations placed on women. Using emotional responses in schooltime writings, Black and White students asserted their intellectual capabilities. In doing so, these students reimagined their place in the world and questioned norms that relegated them to passive, non-intellectual roles or denied them access to intellectual spaces. This study also highlights how the realities of African American students differed from those of their White peers, as race and gender intersected to shape the students’ educational and emotional experiences in distinct ways.Footnote 8
Historian and anthropologist William M. Reddy’s concept of emotives deepens my interpretative framework by highlighting the performative nature of emotional expressions. Emotives, or first-person declarations of emotion, are not just descriptive—rather, they actively shape identities and relationships. Reddy explains that because emotives have “self-exploring and self-altering effects,” they “are like performatives in that they do something to the world.”Footnote 9 While an emotion can remain an internal, unspoken experience, an emotive names the moment when that emotion is articulated in language. Once expressed, emotions are not neutral reflections of inner states; they are social acts that carry consequences. By expressing emotives like excitement, determination, and hope in their schooltime writings, students negotiated social expectations and, in some cases, altered their own self-perceptions.
This article contributes to two key historiographical discussions. First, it expands on the foundational insights of historians of early American women’s education, notably Linda Kerber, Mary Kelley, and Kabria Baumgartner, by studying the intersection of education, domesticity, and aspiration through the examination of emotional expression.Footnote 10 Kerber argues that, after the American Revolution, White women embraced “Republican Motherhood”—raising civically minded families—to gain intellectual and social influence.Footnote 11 This article builds on her argument by exploring how young Black and White women used emotional expression to assert intellectual agency beyond the domestically defined limits of “Republican Motherhood.” Kelley contends that formal education facilitated women’s entry into “civil society.” This article extends that perspective by demonstrating how affective expressions served as socially meaningful acts of public intellectual self-assertion. Finally, Baumgartner highlights Black women’s legal and institutional activism in their nineteenth-century fight for education. This article expands that lens, showing how Black and White young women used emotional expression within educational spaces to assert intellectual agency and push against restrictive social norms. Second, this paper adds to the growing scholarship on the history of emotions, particularly focusing on nineteenth-century American women’s emotional experiences.Footnote 12 The paper intervenes in debates within the history of emotion by showing how educational writings became sites of emotional production.Footnote 13 Building on performance theory, I draw on Reddy’s concept of emotives to show how affective expression renegotiated restrictive domestic ideals.
My analysis draws on diverse archival sources—ranging from private diaries to published compositions—each shaped by distinct audiences and contexts. This variability necessitates a focused sample of students to allow for careful analysis of how emotional expression functioned across different kinds of educational writing. This article examines the schooltime writings of seven women—three Black and four White students—who attended seminaries, academies, and schools in the Northeast in the three decades before the Civil War. I selected these individuals—two anonymous Black students from Prudence Crandall’s Canterbury Female Seminary as well as Charlotte Forten, and White students Caroline Wills, Marion Tooley, Sarah Ellen Browne, and Elvina Metcalf—because their writings vividly capture how young women used emotional expression to navigate educational spaces, assert intellectual belonging, and articulate personal and political aspirations. While background on the students was not available in every case, for those for whom it was, I can report that they came from families that had both the economic means and cultural orientation to invest in their daughters’ formal education—a social reality that sets them apart from many girls in the antebellum period. While their writings reflect the experiences of a relatively privileged cohort, they offer insight into how emotional expression was shaped by the norms of their school cultures, the expectations of their audiences (peers, teachers, family, or public readers), and the rhetorical conventions of the time.
In the case of Black students, extant schooltime writings are far less numerous than those of their White counterparts. The uneven archive reflects the broader structural constraints of the period and underscores the significance of the voices that do remain. Those whose writings have survived—such as Forten and the two anonymous Canterbury students—represent a small but significant group whose opportunities were exceptional.Footnote 14 Notably, the imaginative scope of these writings often extended beyond personal advancement. Their emotional reflections articulate visions of a country free from the dehumanizing institution of chattel slavery—suggesting a reimagining that was not only personal but profoundly political. For White students, by contrast, the emotional reimagining found in their schooltime writings more often centered on personal aspirations, intellectual ambitions, and the negotiation of gendered expectations. This contrast, explored throughout the article, aligns with existing scholarship on antebellum White women’s education, which shows how many middle-class students used writing to assert personhood and intellectual legitimacy within the bounds of prevailing norms.Footnote 15 While these sources cannot speak for all young women of the era, they illuminate how a specific subset navigated the tensions between aspiration and social constraint through emotional expression.
Excitement, Hope, and Determination in White Women’s Schooltime Writings
The battle for educational opportunities unfolded differently for White and Black women. After the American Revolution, elite White women popularized the concept of “Republican Motherhood,” which positioned women’s in-home teaching as central to the transmission of republican values to subsequent generations.Footnote 16 Kerber has shown that it was the popularization of the “Republican Mother” identity that fueled increased opportunities for White women’s formal education.Footnote 17 Women’s schools proliferated as part of the seminary movement following the American Revolution. Kelley states that “between 1790 and 1830, 182 academies and at least 14 seminaries were established exclusively for women in the North and the South.”Footnote 18 These numerous institutions succeeded in providing White young women with educational opportunities that mirrored those provided to men at colleges. For example, White students at St. Mary’s Hall in Burlington, New Jersey, studied “Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Belles Lettres, Geography, Arithmetic, Grammar, Elocution, Philology, Composition and Botany continued, Physiology, Universal and Ecclesiastical History, and Astronomy.”Footnote 19
As schools for White women proliferated in the early nineteenth century, students such as Caroline Wills, a Maryland native and Troy Female Seminary student from 1838 to 1840, wrote excitedly about the opportunities these changes afforded.Footnote 20 Wills recognized that she lived in a time of significant progress in women’s education. She observed, “How different are the advantages of female education, in the present day compared with those of half a century ago!” She continued, “Institutions have been funded and females are now instructed in all the branches of education. In former days they were only taught the most common branches.”Footnote 21 By signaling her excitement for the advancements in women’s education, Wills asserted an eagerness regarding the possibilities that these increases afforded her and her generation of female students. Additionally, Wills’s entry illustrates that she understood the social barriers in place that had barred women from inhabiting academic spaces, which in turn reinforced a gendered hierarchy of knowledge. This is particularly clear in her statement: “The influence of truth has broken in upon the minds of the other sex, their prejudices against the education of females have yielded to this influence.”Footnote 22 Therefore, Wills’s expression, in part, reveals an excitement for the (partial) collapse of gendered barriers to education and intellectual cultivation.
Marion M. Tooley, a White Troy Female Seminary student from Oneida County, New York, used her published composition, “The Picture Gallery,” to assert intellectual ambition and reflect on what it meant to cultivate an academic self.Footnote 23 In the composition, Tooley establishes the titular gallery as a metaphor for her own mind and intellectual development. Specifically, the author imagines herself being led through an art-filled gallery by an unnamed guide who condemns the display of artwork, which depicts “many scenes in which beauties and deformities were so closely blended.”Footnote 24 The guide’s assertion that the poorly composed art gallery could be “destroyed in an hour” contrasts sharply with the durability of knowledge, which, once acquired, is not so easily lost.Footnote 25 This pivotal moment underscores that a student’s knowledge acquisition must be curated thoughtfully and with purpose.
This reflection illuminates Tooley’s evolving sense of herself as a student and thinker. Her fictional self comes to see the errors in her former pastimes: “My days were devoted to trifling conversation, or the perusal of popular novels; my nights to theatrical entertainments.”Footnote 26 Tooley’s character understands that these activities were ephemeral and superficial compared with knowledge gained through careful cultivation. Through this composition, Tooley models an emerging ideal of educated womanhood that is deliberate, self-aware, and ambitious. By linking the curation of art to the curation of thought, she signals that academic rigor is an intentional, reflective process that demands sustained attention and moral engagement. Notably, she seeks to reject “feminine” pastimes—novel reading, casual conversation, and theatergoing—in favor of sustained academic engagement.
The courses of study offered at schools for White women cultivated not only academically well-rounded students but, as evidenced by Tooley’s composition, academically determined women. Society expected educated White women’s academic accomplishments to serve the domestic sphere, and early advocates for women’s education reinforced this view by framing women’s intellectual development as valuable primarily for their future roles as wives and mothers. In her appeal to the New York state legislature in 1819, Emma Willard argued, “If the female character be raised, it must inevitably raise that of the other sex…. As evidence that this statement does not exaggerate the female influence in society, our sex need but be considered, in the single relation of mothers.”Footnote 27 Catharine Beecher, founder of the Hartford Female Seminary (1823) and the Western Female Institute (1833), agreed with Willard, arguing that women’s education must prepare them for their duties as wives and mothers. She wrote of students in the 1840s, “Why, then, should not that science and art [domestic economy], which a woman is to practice during her whole life, be studied and recited?”Footnote 28 Willard’s and Beecher’s comments demonstrate the degree to which the labors of domesticity significantly shaped the potential futures that White women could inhabit after completing their educations. Despite their academic achievements, White students remained constrained by what historian Lucia McMahon calls the concept of “mere equality”—that is, an imperfect compromise, where the notion of women’s intellectual equality rested on the underlying belief in gender difference.Footnote 29 Furthermore, it is important to note that Willard’s and Beecher’s arguments implicitly excluded Black women from this educational vision, thus perpetuating the hegemonic image of the White woman as normative student, wife, mother and homemaker.
Educational reformers and popular writers alike reinforced the belief that White women’s education should primarily prepare them for domestic life. Lydia Maria Child wrote in The Mother’s Book, for instance, “Neither learning nor accomplishments do any harm to man or woman if the motive for acquiring them be a proper one…. I believe a variety of knowledge … would make a man a better servant, as well as a better president; and make a woman a better wife, as well as a better teacher.”Footnote 30 For Child, the proper motive for women seeking to acquire knowledge was to make her a better helpmate to her husband and teacher to her children. Fanny Fern’s short story “A Practical Blue-Stocking” portrays an educated wife and mother who takes up a career in writing when her husband falls ill but still ensures that “no parental or household duty [is] neglected.”Footnote 31 Even in Fern’s ironic reworking of the term “bluestocking,” education remained framed as being compatible with, and subordinate to, women’s domestic obligations.
Advocates for White women’s education in the early nineteenth century framed it as essential for domestic utility, but students themselves did not always see their academic experiences as simply preparation for marriage and motherhood. For example, during her time at the Troy Female Seminary, Caroline Wills embraced botany as a fulfilling intellectual pursuit beyond domestic duties. By expressing excitement for a subject that she learned and envisioning a post-seminary future in which that interest remained central, Wills reimagined what domestic life could look like. On March 17, 1840, she noted in her diary, in which she composed letters to her acquaintances before sending them, “My dear friend, have you ever studied Botany…. I have commenced and am, anticipating much pleasure from its pursuit.” She continued: “You are well aware of my fondness for flowers, but this seems to bring to view beauties, which were before unseen. When the season of their flowering comes we shall make botanical excursions.”Footnote 32 Wills’s anticipation of the “pleasure” she would find in her further study of botany is noteworthy, as it reflects her growing passion for an academic discipline she planned to pursue long-term. Additionally, her comment that the formal study of botany rendered formally “unseen” “beauties” legible indicates how her intellectual development expanded her worldview and brought her a deep sense of fulfillment. Finally, that Wills planned to “make botanical excursions” upon returning home reveals her intention to incorporate her new knowledge into her daily routines once out of school. Wills’s diary reveals that she did not intend to confine her intellectual pursuits to the classroom. Instead, she was determined to bring her new knowledge home and incorporate it into the routines of her community. The idea of organizing “botanical excursions” with friends suggests that Wills was subtly redefining her future domestic life to include continuous academic engagement, especially woman-led intellectual growth.
In the same diary, Wills expressed hope that her female friends would also think of education as central to their post-seminary futures. In another drafted letter, she expressed a hopeful, forward-looking vision that foregrounded ongoing intellectual development. She wrote: “I understand the term of your school expires in May, when you will have finished your school going; I will not say education, for no one has ever finished.”Footnote 33 Given that formal collegiate educational opportunities for women were extremely limited (with Oberlin College, founded in 1833, being a rare exception), a woman’s schooling often ended with her seminary experience. Despite this, Wills’s statement reflects her hope that education could continue beyond formal schooling. By suggesting that “no one has ever finished” their education, she challenged the idea that learning concluded when women returned to their domestic roles. Instead, she envisioned the domestic sphere as a potential site for continued woman-led intellectual engagement and knowledge production.
Elvina Metcalf, a White student from Illinois who studied at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, also envisioned a future where her education extended beyond domestic roles.Footnote 34 In December 1838, Metcalf wrote of one of her teachers, Transcendentalist author and editor Margaret Fuller,
Such a heart we do not often see united with so great an intellect and blessed are those who can be taught by her even if it is a short time. Would that there were more like her in this world, how very different the state of society would be if one half the women that composed it had the high, exalted views of Miss Fuller. May those who have been under her care show that her teachings have not been in vain…. Let us remember that she may ever be an example for us.Footnote 35
According to Metcalf’s glowing portrait of her teacher, Fuller’s example of educated womanhood provided her with hope. Indeed, Metcalf envisioned a much-improved society if “one half the women that composed it had the high, exalted views of Miss Fuller.” Fuller starkly contrasted with the domestic expectations of antebellum society. By 1838, at the age of twenty-eight, she had established herself as a distinguished teacher and, in the fall of 1839, became the editor of The Dial, the leading Transcendentalist journal, defying the social norms of marriage and motherhood. Fuller was not alone; many women who pursued careers in teaching either delayed marriage or never married, as exemplified by figures such as Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon. Metcalf’s aspiration to emulate Fuller—“that she may ever be an example for us”—reflects her desire not only to follow an exemplary figure but to fundamentally redefine the boundaries of conventional antebellum femininity. Furthermore, in her hope for women’s progress towards genuinely changing society, Metcalf conveyed that such an outcome could only occur through the leadership of students who admired their former teacher, as evident in her wish that Fuller’s former students ensure their teacher’s lessons were not “in vain.”
Across schools for women, rigorous curricula demonstrated that female students were capable of serious scholarly work. This rigor fostered a sense of academic determination in students. White students’ expressions of determination can be read as a form of emotional expression that critiqued a society that trivialized women’s intellect. These expressions also provide a useful point of contrast for understanding how Black women navigated additional barriers to education. Expressions of academic determination can be seen in the letters of Sarah Ellen Browne, a White woman from Salem, Massachusetts, to her mother during her time at Elizabeth Agassiz’s women’s school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Footnote 36 Browne’s description of her studies highlights the amount of work she put into her schooling. Early in the term, on September 27, 1856, Browne wrote to her mother,
I have commenced studying German in [illegible] German Grammar and Exercises. In French, I am going to translate a love story by Rodolphe Topffer. I am afraid I shall not be able to keep on with this class, it is so hard to translate…. I shall try and keep on with it.Footnote 37
Although Browne feared that she would not be able to keep up with the scholarly tasks assigned at school, her academic determination is evident in the progress she subsequently described to her mother. Two months later, she wrote, “I have commenced to translate, in Rolker’s German Reader.”Footnote 38 Browne continue to progress and grow more proud, as evident in a February 1857 letter where she noted her work translating a long-form German poem: “‘I am getting on quite finely with my studies. In German, we are translating Schiller’s ‘Song of the Bell.’ I shall finish it in four more lessons.’”Footnote 39 Finally, by that March, Browne had moved on to translating entire plays, noting: “In my German, I have finished translating the story, ‘The Broken Pitcher’ [by Heinrich von Kleist].”Footnote 40 Through her academic perseverance, Browne defied the assumption that women were intellectually inferior to men.
Browne’s academic success in Cambridge was not only a reflection of her intellectual growth but also of her prioritization for learning above all else. For instance, Browne’s resolve is clear in a March 1857 letter: “I will try always to think of my studies, before visiting.”Footnote 41 Her commitment is furthermore exemplified in an earlier letter from 1856, in which she explained why she had not yet read excerpts of the Dred Scott v. Sandford trial that her brother had brought her: “Albert brought Dred, over for me to read. I shan’t be able to read it till I come home in vacation, I have so many lessons to learn.”Footnote 42 Her focus on her studies was so strong that she could not even pause to read about this significant legal and political event as the nation hurdled toward Civil War.
As a White student, Browne could retreat into her studies—a luxury largely denied to Black women, whose access to education was restricted by racial exclusion and threatened by violence. The writings of Charlotte Forten and Canterbury Seminary students demonstrate how, unlike Browne, Black women could not separate education from current events and political realities; instead, they assigned both of these things equal weight as they sought to make sense of their circumstances and envisioned their futures.
Excitement, Hope, and Determination in Black Women’s Schooltime Writings
While White women’s educational opportunities expanded across the North and South in the early nineteenth century, Black women’s access remained limited due to persistent racial discrimination and segregation. Historian Hilary Moss argues that “by advancing an argument for universal education that privileged citizenship instead of equality, [early American] school reformers inadvertently reinforced efforts to deny black people access to public schooling.”Footnote 43 For instance, in a petition to the Massachusetts legislature, Eunice Ross, an African American student from Nantucket, described being denied entry to a public high school despite passing the entrance exam: “The undersigned … was examined in 1840 by the School Committee and found amply qualified for admission into the High School at Nantucket, and was refused admittance by a vote of the town.”Footnote 44 Further demonstrating the persistence of segregation was the Massachusetts legislature’s delay in outlawing school segregation until 1855, despite the anti-segregation case Sarah Roberts v. The City of Boston reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1849.Footnote 45 These actions illustrate how deeply embedded racism was in antebellum culture. Denying African American children education was, in part, a denial of the newly formed “romantic” ideal of childhood, “which viewed children as symbols of purity, spontaneity, and emotional expressiveness.”Footnote 46 As scholar Robin Bernstein argues, this ideal of childhood innocence was “raced white,” excluding Black children from the perception of innocence that American society afforded White children.Footnote 47
Black Americans also faced White resistance to their entrance into private schools. White anxieties about the potentially radical consequences of educating Black students, particularly in the aftermath of the Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, led residents of New Haven, Connecticut, to halt the proposed creation of the New Haven Negro College in 1831.Footnote 48 Later in the 1830s, Connecticut lawmakers passed a law that prohibited Black students from entering and residing in the state for the purpose of gaining an education.Footnote 49 Officials used this law to facilitate the closure of Prudence Crandall’s female seminary in Canterbury, Connecticut, after she integrated it.Footnote 50 In the Canterbury case, Crandall, a White Quaker, faced the brunt of lawmaker and mob violence after she integrated her seminary in 1832. In response to the White backlash to the school’s integration Crandall remade the seminary into an all-African American women’s school. Yet opposition to the school continued, culminating in Crandall’s arrest, mob violence, a lengthy series of trials, and the eventual closure of her school.Footnote 51 An image of an unnamed school for African American women and its accompanying caption from the 1839 edition of the Anti-Slavery Almanac captures the violent opposition African American educational institutions faced, demonstrating that the Canterbury case was not an anomaly. The picture shows a school for African American women under siege (see Figure 1). Its caption reads: “COLORED SCHOOLS BROKEN UP, IN THE FREE STATES. When schools have been established for colored scholars, the law-makers and the mob have combined to destroy them.”Footnote 52
Image from the 1839 issue of the Anti-Slavery Almanac. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1839, Being the Third After Bissextile or Leap-Year, and the 63d of American Independence. Calculated for Boston; Adapted to the New England States (New York and Boston, 1839), Cornell University Library, Digital Collections, Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/may876311.
Although domestic ideals drove the expansion of White women’s education in the early nineteenth century, antebellum society excluded Black women from these ideals and the protections and opportunities they provided. Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman turned author and activist, famously identified the protections of womanhood that antebellum society systematically denied African American women. She wrote of her girlhood in slavery: “No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress … there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.”Footnote 53 Though she spoke specifically of her experience as an enslaved girl, Jacobs’s excerpt serves as a stark reminder that Black women, North and South, lived in a society that denied them the protections afforded to White women. White women, particularly those of the middle and upper classes, could rely—however imperfectly—on legal structures, family status, and social expectations to shield them from certain forms of exploitation. In contrast, Black women, whether enslaved or free, had little protection, as even Northern society largely tolerated the injustices that Black women (free and enslaved) faced, thus reinforcing the systematic disregard for their safety and dignity. According to historian Susan Stanfield, “For black women … the tools for performing true womanhood were not readily available.”Footnote 54 Free Black communities had to cultivate middle-class respectability through institution building, a process met with violent White resistance, as seen in the opposition to African American school integration and the establishment of Black schools.Footnote 55
Not all forms of White resistance to the growth of a free Black middle class in the antebellum North were as overtly violent as the destruction of Black schools. However, less physically violent forms of resistance were no less entrenched in White supremacy. William Summers’s 1833 etching A Black Tea Party furthers the idea of Black women’s incompatibility with middle-class values, with a particular focus on their inability to exist properly in the domestic sphere (see Figure 2). Summers’s cartoon traffics in racist misrepresentation through both the appearance of his characters and their speech. The depiction in the cartoon presents the very idea of a refined Black homemaker as laughable. For example, the lady of the house is incapable of even properly pouring tea for her guests. Disparaging representations like this one not only denied Black women the dignity of middle-class respectability but also reinforced social barriers that positioned them as perpetual outsiders to the lauded antebellum domestic ideal.
William Summers, Life in Philadelphia No. 7, A Black Tea Party (London, 1833), Library Company of Philadelphia, https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A60250?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=3ba817707e1ffd413176&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=0.
In her schooltime diary, Charlotte Forten, a member of a prominent Black abolitionist family in Philadelphia and student at the Higginson Grammar School for Girls and later the Salem Normal School, both in Salem, Massachusetts, subverted the anti-domestic stereotypes antebellum Black women encountered.Footnote 56 This is evident, for instance, in her enthusiasm for learning about England. She wrote on June 20, 1854, “Commenced reading Macaulay’s ‘History of England.’ I know that I shall like it, as I do everything that relates to England; there is a charm for me even in its very name.”Footnote 57 Scholar Myra C. Glenn has described Forten as an “Anglophile,” observing how she, like other African American abolitionists, admired Britain for its leading role in transatlantic abolition via the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which set in motion the end of human ownership throughout most of the British Empire. Forten’s relationship with England was complex, however. Glenn continues: “Forten’s fulsome admiration for a civilization that colonized and exploited peoples of color throughout the world reflected how closely she identified with white Anglo-Saxon culture and ignored the racism permeating British society.”Footnote 58 However, Forten’s attraction to British culture also seems to stem from her view of it as a progressive alternative to the racial hostility she experienced in America.
In fact, a central aspect of Forten’s excitement regarding British society was that it offered her—and African American women like her—a revised, inclusive domestic ideal. A diary entry from July 17, 1854, reveals the domestic desires Forten envisioned as possible in England:
Oh! England my heart yearns towards thee as to a loved and loving friend! I long to behold thee, to dwell in one of thy quiet homes, far from the scenes of my early childhood; far from the land, my native land—where I am hated and oppressed because God has given me a dark skin.Footnote 59
For White women, the home symbolized stability, privacy, and respectability—privileges that were routinely denied to African American women, no matter their social standing. Forten’s vision of a “quiet home” in England was not just a fantasy founded in Anglophilia. Instead, it symbolically asserted her right to the same protection and peace that her domestic virtue supposedly warranted. In making this assertion, Forten redefined narrow and exclusionary concepts of womanhood that would deny her both safety and equality.
This desire to reshape the prevailing, limiting notion of “the home” is particularly significant when considered in the context of Forten’s disappointment just a month before that July entry, when her father made the decision not to move the family to Massachusetts because of his concern about to the racial tensions ignited by a fugitive slave case in Boston. On June 10, Forten registered her disappointment, “I do not wish to have my long-cherished plan of our having together a pleasant New England home, defeated.”Footnote 60 Her excitement for learning about England in school, then, can be read not only as stemming from an attraction to British culture but also as a response to the racial hostility that thwarted her family’s aspirations for a safe, comfortable home in Massachusetts. Forten’s excitement, therefore, transcends Anglophilia. Instead, it was an imaginative yearning that placed her and her family beyond the pervasive consequences of chattel slavery. Envisioning herself in a “quiet home” in England, particularly in the context of her own upended domestic hopes, Forten visualized herself claiming the social and emotional security that African American women were denied in the United States. Thus, Forten’s excitement reflects her desire to reshape the prevailing ideals of domesticity, envisioning a future reality where African American women and families could actively define and inhabit a home life free from racial exclusion and limitations.
In the face of different forms of White resistance, both legal and extralegal, opportunities for Black women’s education still existed throughout the antebellum United States, even as the very domestic ideals that justified educational expansion for White women were systematically denied to Black women. Like schools for White young women, integrated schools and all-Black women’s schools offered students a rigorous curriculum. One such school was the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York, founded by abolitionist and Presbyterian minister Hiram Huntington Kellogg, which integrated in 1839 after Black student Mary E. Miles applied for admission following the destruction of Crandall’s integrated seminary.Footnote 61 Some of the academic classes available to students were arithmetic, drawing, astronomy, geography, composition, and botany.Footnote 62 Another such school was the Normal School for Colored Girls, founded in Washington, DC, by Myrtilla Miner, a former student at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary. Miner’s school provided Black women with various academic opportunities that were geared toward intellectual enrichment. A former student noted: “Rev. Moncure D. Conway gave a course of lectures on the ‘Origin of Words,’ from which we were required to take copious notes. Mr. Walter W. Johnson also gave us very elaborate lessons in astronomy.”Footnote 63 While there were fewer educational options available to African American students compared to options available for White students, integrated schools and all-Black women’s schools sought to offer Black scholars a rigorous curriculum on par with what White students received.
Additionally, African American writers and speakers continued to advocate for the importance of education for their race. Two examples that illustrate this advocacy come from two African American women. The African American lecturer Maria Stewart said in an 1833 speech, “We have suffered ourselves to be considered as dastards, cowards, mean, faint-hearted wretches…. These things have fired my soul with holy indignation, and compelled me to thus come forward, and endeavor to turn their attention to knowledge and improvement; for knowledge is power.”Footnote 64 In another speech given later in 1833, Stewart focused on the intellect of women:
In the 15th century … we might then have seen women preaching and mixing themselves in controversies. Women occupying the chairs of Philosophy and Justice; women writing in Greek, and studying in Hebrew. Nuns were poetesses, and women of quality Divines…. Women in those days devoted their leisure hours to contemplation and study.Footnote 65
This passage of Stewart’s speech can be read as a call to action for African American men and women to take women’s intellect seriously, and as a call specifically to African American women to cultivate their intellect by emphasizing the possibility inherent to such a historical precedent. The second example of advocacy by African American women appears a few years later, in an 1841 collection of writings by African American essayist Ann Plato: “How altogether important, then, is education; it is our guide in youth, and it will walk with us in the vale of our declining years.”Footnote 66 For Plato, education was something that one maintained throughout their life. Stewart’s and Plato’s writings reveal a determination to pursue and advocate for lifelong education for Black men and women. This determination can be read as a direct challenge to the dehumanizing racialized stereotypes that sought to deny Black intellectual capacity and ambition.
For African American women students, assertions of academic determination served as rebuttals to race-and-gender-based barriers to education. An anonymous Canterbury student’s composition, printed in the July 6, 1833, edition of The Liberator, offers a powerful departure from the racist norms of the period, which stymied the growth of Black schools. It is important to consider this composition’s audience. First, it was likely read aloud during an examination period on the Canterbury campus. Second, the composition appeared in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, a popular abolitionist weekly. Thus, this composition had a very wide audience both on and off the student’s campus. In it, the student reflects on the hope for academic advancement that arose when Prudence Crandall integrated her school. The student also addressed the harmful impact of racist claims against Black students, writing:
It is not until the present time that we have begun to enjoy that which our minds have desired; viz. the advantages of a good education. But what suddenly overshadows that bright ray which began to beam upon us? It is prejudice—that dark misty cloud, which is born by selfishness and ignorance…. By our own feelings, we too well know the oppression we bear, we know that many among whom we dwell, have endeavored to debar us from every ray of light that would tend to show us that we possess equal rights and privileges with the whites.Footnote 67
This student’s written claim is bold, as she spoke truth to power in a public venue all while controversy swirled in Canterbury. Beyond directly naming and repudiating racism and prejudice, the student evidenced clear academic determination. She wrote: “I trust the means of knowledge will yet be ours, and if we are compelled to separate, let us, adorned with virtue and modesty, earnestly and diligently pursue every thing that will bring respect to ourselves.”Footnote 68 While the fate of Crandall’s newly all-African American school was yet unsettled, this student did not indulge in naive optimism; she had witnessed the force of racism in her own community. Instead, she presented a contingency plan if Crandall’s school should close. Central to that plan was the continued accumulation of knowledge. Interestingly, this student rhetorically linked knowledge accumulation with “virtue and modesty,” two attributes often ascribed to White middle-class women. Such a statement reinforces my claim that African American women used emotives—in this case, an expression of academic determination—to challenge racial barriers to education and revise the concept of domesticity.Footnote 69 Indeed, this Black student challenged the systematic exclusion of Black women from the Victorian domestic ideal by imbuing young African American women with traits often applied to their White counterparts.
Charlotte Forten’s diary also illustrates academic determination. When Forten was a student at Higginson Grammar School for Girls, a sensational fugitive slave case played out in Boston, which ended in the most terrible resolution: the escapee’s return. On June 4, 1854, Forten considered her academic efforts in relation to the horrible events in nearby Boston. While White Cambridge student Sarah Ellen Browne chose to focus on her studies instead of engaging with legal and political matters, Forten, as a Black student, lacked that privilege. She instead directly confronted the atrocities of chattel slavery. She wrote:
To-morrow school commences, and although the pleasure I shall feel in again seeing my beloved teacher, and in resuming my studies will be much saddened by recent events, yet they shall be a fresh incentive to more earnest study, to aid me in fitting myself for laboring in a holy cause for enabling me to do much towards changing the condition of my oppressed and suffering people.Footnote 70
Forten’s expression of resolve at the start of the school year is an assertion of intellectual agency. First, through her eagerness to return to school, Forten affirmed her right to inhabit an educational space. By showing her commitment to resuming her studies and connecting with teachers, despite being “much saddened by” the recent capture and return of a fugitive slave in nearby Boston, Forten’s emotional response reveals a reassertion of intellectual purpose. For her, the personal was inherently political. Indeed, Forten’s academic perseverance in the face of injustice became an act of defiance against a racist society. She understood her singular educational opportunity as an opportunity for intellectual betterment for her “oppressed and suffering people.” In fact, Forten expressed what the historian Stephanie Shaw calls “socially responsible individualism”—that is, a community strategy that “[encouraged] and [provided] for high levels of achievement and then [linked] that individual success to community development.”Footnote 71 Through her open dedication to her studies, she presented herself as a model of educated African American womanhood and envisioned herself as a conduit for further African American academic uplift.
Additionally, Charlotte Forten’s diary entries from her time in Salem schools illustrate how academic enthusiasm could function as a way of asserting her place within intellectual life and imagining possibilities beyond the confines of a racist society. “This year has been to me a very happy one,” Forten wrote elatedly on December 31, 1854, in an end-of-the-year reflection of her studies at Higginson Grammar School for Girls. She attributed her happiness to the “field of knowledge” that, for the first time, “seemed widely open” to her. By noting that she had “learned more” than in any other year, Forten was not only celebrating personal achievement but affirming her academic competence.Footnote 72 In making these statements, she claimed her right to access an educational space that was often barred to free African American women, as seen in the backlash surrounding the Canterbury case.
Black students in the North, though not directly affected by slavery, used emotives in their schooltime writings to envision a more just future for their race. In doing so, these students used their educational experiences to challenge the entrenched racial order of early America. Another anonymous student composition that appeared in The Liberator, this one in the April 6, 1833, issue, evidenced the way expressions of hope functioned as a form of reimagining American society. Unlike Sarah Ellen Browne, who chose to focus on her studies rather than read transcripts from the Dred Scott case, this Black Canterbury student directly confronted the social and political realities of chattel slavery in a school composition. It read, in part:
We have still to lament the fact, that our American people have been and multitudes yet are, co-workers in the awful, heaven-daring sin, that of enslaving and destroying millions of our African brethren, tearing them from their native homes, sundering the most tender ties, parting parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, binding them with chains, shutting them up in dungeons, branding them with red hot iron, depriving them forever of liberty, and placing them as low in the scale of human beings as the very beasts of the fields.Footnote 73
Despite this grim depiction, which features graphic scenes of domestic terror, the author expressed profound hope, which is manifested on two levels. First, the student described Christian hope, writing, “Contemplate that awful disclosure which will be made at the resurrection day, when all, both the oppressed and the oppressor, shall stand before an impartial Judge.”Footnote 74 The student anticipated that a just God “will make them free indeed,” thus emphasizing a divine reckoning that would transcend earthly injustices.Footnote 75 Second, the student expressed a hope of racial justice by envisioning a future in which “the chains of the oppressed shall no more clank in our ears—when tears will no longer water, nor sighs be permitted to fan the soil of happy Columbia.”Footnote 76 This hopeful description of the future anticipated a radically different vision of the country—one in which the emancipation of the currently enslaved fundamentally altered the national community. Baumgartner has argued, in her study of Black Canterbury seminary students’ writings, that “in speeches and letters, these students evoked and implemented an ethic of Christian love…. This ethic was neither meek nor militant but a powerful act of social protest.”Footnote 77 What is striking about this schooltime composition is that it does not involve the author’s schooling or women’s education more generally. Rather, it is focused on the whole of society, envisioning a more radically just country. Although it was different from the rest of my sources, I chose to include this composition because it demonstrates a woman bringing her education to bear, via a schooltime composition, on a vitally important topic that affected her personally.
Charlotte Forten’s poem “A Parting Hymn,” written while she was a student at Higginson Grammar School for Girls to commemorate the end of the term, offers another powerful example of hope as a student’s mode for reimagining her intellectual place in a society that sought to restrict her.Footnote 78 Forten’s poem expresses a vision for the future in which she and her classmates would continue to engage in “noble work” beyond their formal education. Like the above composition in The Liberator, Forten’s poem is another example of an African American woman using a product of her schooling, her honed intellect, to challenge gendered and racialized social orders. The second stanza reads:
Forth to a noble work they go
O, may their hearts keep pure,
And hopeful zeal and strength be theirs
To labor and endure,
That they an earnest faith may prove
By words of truth and deeds of love.Footnote 79
In the poem, Forten envisions a future where educated women contribute to bettering society through “words of truth and deeds of love,” presenting an encouraging and elevated view of women’s work that does not stop at the bounds of the domestic sphere. Instead, the poem presents alumnae as having real potential to alter the national trajectory. Her anticipatory portrayal of women as active agents of change can be read as a challenge to the belief that African American and White women’s work had little consequence outside the home. Forten’s articulateness and the clear way in which her hopeful words demonstrate her intellectual capability becomes more apparent when one considers her stated aspirations for her life after completing school. She noted in her diary, “I often say I should like to be—an Anti-Slavery lecturer.”Footnote 80 Forten hoped to have a career in which she publicly challenged slavery, positioning herself as an active intellectual figure who challenged racial inequalities. Indeed, she followed through with her goals by putting her education to political use. Upon the Union army’s occupation of South Carolina’s Sea Islands, which made possible the Port Royal Experiment—an initiative that saw approximately 10,000 formerly enslaved people transition to freedom— Forten moved to the South to teach formerly enslaved individuals. Forten documented this work in a two-part essay, titled “Life on the Sea Islands,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1864.
Conclusion
Antebellum women’s schooltime writings—letters, diaries, and compositions—provide a unique glimpse into their lives during a time when educational opportunities for women expanded. However, these opportunities did not flourish equally for all groups; racism in the North significantly limited educational access for young Black women. Nonetheless, extant sources reveal what Black students and White students learned, thought, and felt as they progressed through their education.
The writings of Black and White students demonstrate that these young women navigated complex emotional landscapes, shaped by their aspirations and the racial and gender constraints imposed upon them. By examining their expressions of excitement, determination, and hope, it becomes clear that emotional expression allowed both groups to assert their intellectual potential within a society that sought to limit their advancement. While emotional expression was present in both groups’ writings, its meaning both diverged and converged. For Black women, expressions of excitement, determination, and hope were not only a means to challenge and revise the exclusionary domestic ideal, but also a way to assert their rights to educational opportunities. In contrast, for White women—who faced fewer barriers to education—asserting their right to learn was less crucial. Instead, their emotional expressions focused on reconceptualizing the domestic ideal, highlighting how their post-school lives could be enriched through continued learning. Through these emotional expressions, Black and White students articulated a vision for a more equitable future, one in which they could fully embrace an intellectual identity. In doing so, both groups of students revised conventional, limiting, and exclusionary notions of domesticity.
Sarabeth Rambold is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Rochester. She wrote this article while serving as the Fisher Center Predoctoral Fellow at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She thanks Claire Becker, Melanie Chambliss, Robinson Murphy, Brianna Theobald, the Hobart and William Smith History Department, the HEQ editorial team, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and support.
