The Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia was the first government recognized institution established for women's higher education in the United States. Located on Cherry Street, between Third and Fourth Streets in Philadelphia [1] and founded by John Poor on June 4, 1787, it was chartered on January 7, 1792. It provided young women with a diverse curriculum, notably teaching students about various components of English, science, arithmetic, history, and geography. [1]
Founded in the late 18th century, shortly after the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, the academy was established during a period of American history when women were expected to engage in Republican Motherhood. Historians often cite Republican Motherhood as the reason women's education rose to prominence in the early Republic. [2] Due to the idea that women were to educate members of their household on concepts of virtue, access to education for women gained broader support. However, women who embodied Republican Motherhood were restricted in the scope of their education; their learning was supposed to focus on serving home and family, that is, the domestic sphere. [3] Historian Margaret Nash describes access to women's education in the early Republic as a means to spreading knowledge to the greater society as a whole, rather than as an end for women themselves. [2]
Benjamin Rush and many other contemporaries viewed the academy as an institution established to promote these ideas of Republican Motherhood. Rush believed that women's education ought to be practical for domestic tasks, as well as include traditional academic disciplines such as history and geography. Indeed, in a speech to visitors of the academy, Rush noted that maintaining the wellness of the young Republic and promoting the values of each citizen being equally entitled to liberty "make[s] it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government." [4] He himself taught a chemistry course at the academy. [1]
During and after the American Revolution, Philadelphia was well situated as a location for the school as a significant cultural center in the United States. John Poor, founder and Harvard graduate, was the original principal of the institution. Students came from many different areas of the United States and originally held the understanding that they were "scholars" and had an opportunity only afforded to the elite. [1] [3] However, daughters of immigrants and less wealthy students attended the school starting around 1794, perhaps to learn skills to be economically self-sufficient rather than to teach members of the household as expected of Republican Motherhood. [5] The school had a board of "gentlemen visitors," who presented students with awards based upon their performance in an academic discipline or for good behavior, which was awarded to students who displayed proper manners and a mild temperament. [6] Prizes for excellence fueled the school's competitive nature, which mirrored the atmosphere of boy's academies of the time. [5] No other girls' school was granted a charter until 1829, but the academy served as a precursor to hundreds of academies established widely throughout the Republic. [1] [3]
Benjamin Rush was an American revolutionary, a Founding Father of the United States and signatory to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and a civic leader in Philadelphia, where he was a physician, politician, social reformer, humanitarian, educator, and the founder of Dickinson College. Rush was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress. He later described his efforts in support of the American Revolution, saying: "He aimed right." He served as surgeon general of the Continental Army and became a professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
Catharine Esther Beecher was an American educator known for her forthright opinions on female education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of kindergarten into children's education. She published the advice manual The American Woman's Home with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869. Some sources spell her first name as "Catherine".
Emma Hart Willard was an American female education activist who dedicated her life to education. She worked in several schools and founded the first school for women's higher education, the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York. With the success of her school, Willard was able to travel across the country and abroad, to promote education for women. The seminary was renamed the Emma Willard School in 1895 in her honor.
Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy after accepting a position at Vassar College in 1865. She was also the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Amos Eaton was an American botanist, geologist, and educator who is considered the founder of the modern scientific prospectus in education, which was a radical departure from the American liberal arts tradition of classics, theology, lecture, and recitation. Eaton co-founded the Rensselaer School in 1824 with Stephen van Rensselaer III "in the application of science to the common purposes of life". His books in the eighteenth century were among the first published for which a systematic treatment of the United States was attempted, and in a language that all could read. His teaching laboratory for botany in the 1820s was the first of its kind in the country. Eaton's popular lectures and writings inspired numerous thinkers, in particular women, whom he encouraged to attend his public talks on experimental philosophy. Emma Willard would found the Troy Female Seminary, and Mary Mason Lyon, the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Eaton held the rank of senior professor at Rensselaer until his death in 1842.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States.
"Republican Motherhood" is an 18th-century term for an attitude toward women's roles present in the emerging United States before, during, and after the American Revolution. It centered on the belief that the patriots' daughters should be raised to uphold the ideals of republicanism, in order to pass on republican values to the next generation. In this way, the "Republican Mother" was considered a custodian of civic virtue responsible for upholding the morality of her husband and children. Although it is an anachronism, the period of Republican Motherhood is hard to categorize in the history of feminism. On the one hand, it reinforced the idea of a domestic women's sphere separate from the public world of men. On the other hand, it encouraged the education of women and invested their "traditional" sphere with a dignity and importance that had been missing from previous conceptions of women's work.
Education in the Thirteen Colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries varied considerably. Public school systems existed only in New England. In the 18th Century, the Puritan emphasis on literacy largely influenced the significantly higher literacy rate of the Thirteen Colonies, mainly New England, in comparison to Britain and France
The Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut, founded in 1792 by Sarah Pierce, was one of the most important institutions of female education in the United States. During the 30 years after its opening the school enrolled more than 2,000 students from 17 states and territories of the new republic, as well as Canada and the West Indies. Some 1,848 students known to have attended the school have been identified through school lists, diaries and journals, correspondence, as well as art and needlework done at the school. Many more, unidentified to date, attended, especially before 1814, when formal attendance lists were first kept. The longevity of the school, the size of the enrollments, the wide geographic distribution of the student body, the development of the curriculum and the training of teachers, all distinguish it from the numerous other female academies of the Early Republic. The young women were exposed to ideas and customs from all the relatively isolated parts of the new nation, developing a more national perspective than most Americans of the period.
The history of education in the United States covers the trends in educational formal and informal learning in America from the 17th century to the early 21st century.
Sarah Pierce was a teacher, educator and founder of one of the earliest schools for girls in the United States, the Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut. The school having been established in her house in 1792 became known as the Litchfield Female Academy in 1827. The school for girls attracted an estimated 3,000 students from across the United States and Canada. Some of her most famous attendees and protégés were Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In the early colonial history of the United States, higher education was designed for men only. Since the 1800s, women's positions and opportunities in the educational sphere have increased. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, women have surpassed men in number of bachelor's degrees and master's degrees conferred annually in the United States and women have continuously been the growing majority ever since, with men comprising a continuously lower minority in earning either degree. The same asymmetry has occurred with Doctorate degrees since 2005 with women being the continuously growing majority and men a continuously lower minority.
Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps was an American scientist, educator, author, and editor. Her botany writings influenced more early American women to be botanists, including Eunice Newton Foote and her daughter, Augusta Newton Foote Arnold. Though she primarily wrote regarding nature, she also was a writer of novels, essays, and memoir. The standard author abbreviation A.Phelps is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Alice Barber Stephens was an American painter and engraver, best remembered for her illustrations. Her work regularly appeared in magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and The Ladies Home Journal.
The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush is a public, magnet high school located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rush Arts opened in September 2008 after a two-year remodeling and typically has about 630 students each year with roughly 500 females and 130 males. It is generally one of the top 10 schools in the School District of Philadelphia each year when state rankings are published. For yearly demographic and performance data, visit https://schoolprofiles.philasd.org/rush/overview.
A female seminary is a private educational institution for women, popular especially in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when opportunities in educational institutions for women were scarce. The movement was a significant part of a remarkable transformation in American education in the period 1820–1850. Supporting academic education for women, the seminaries were part of a large and growing trend toward women's 'equality'. Some trace its roots to 1815, and characterize it as at the confluence of various liberation movements. Some of the seminaries gradually developed as four-year colleges.
Motherhood in the Spanish Civil War period was a political concept around the idea of women's involvement in support of the state. The blending of definitions of motherhood and womanhood had been occurring in Spain long before this though, with a woman's role being defined as being in the house part of a biological determinism perspective supported by male run institutions in Spain, including the Government and the Catholic Church.
Elizabeth Willing Powel was an American socialite and a prominent member of the Philadelphia upper class of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The daughter, later sister and then wife of mayors of Philadelphia, she was a salonnière who hosted frequent gatherings that became a staple of political life in the city. During the First Continental Congress in 1774, Powel opened her home to the delegates and their families, hosting dinner parties and other events. After the American Revolutionary War, she again took her place among the most prominent Philadelphian socialites, establishing a salon of the Republican Court of leading intellectuals and political figures.
Rebecca Buffum Spring was a Quaker abolitionist, educational reformer, feminist, and women's suffrage activist. She was born in Providence, Rhode Island, fourth daughter of Arnold Buffum (1782-1859), who with William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was the first president. Elizabeth ended her education at the age of 16 and became a teacher in an infant school at the request of her father. Elizabeth Buffum Chace was her sister. She was co-founder in 1836 of the Fall River Female Anti-Slavery Society.
Catherine Allgor is an American historian focusing on women and early American history; she has written and lectured extensively on Dolley Madison and the founding generation of American women. Since 2017 she has served as the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Previously Allgor was appointed to the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation by President Barack Obama and has served as the Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Formerly she was a Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside, and has taught at Claremont McKenna College, Harvard University, and Simmons University. Allgor was a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College and received her PhD from Yale University where she was awarded the Yale Teaching Award. Her dissertation was awarded best dissertation in American history at Yale and received the Lerner-Scott Prize for the Best Dissertation in U.S. Women's History.