In 1781, Lowry Wister produced an eight-page account of her three-year son’s death from small pox. Lowry Wister’s narrative offers important insights into the emotional landscape of mothering, mourning, and religion in late eighteenth-century America. Religious and cultural prescriptions stressed restraint throughout the mourning process, and in particular admonished women to avoid excessive displays of grief. Lowry Wister’s emotional struggles as a “sorrowing mother” enable us to examine the relationship between individual experiences and prescribed expressions of grief and mourning. While eighteenth-century conventions stressed quiet resignation to God’s will, emerging cultural changes increasingly enabled – indeed, encouraged – women to give public voice to their private emotions. By the nineteenth century, sentimental views of childhood, along with a culture of mourning, inspired parents – especially mothers – to give full expression to intense feelings of loss and sorrow. Lowry Wister’s narrative reveals how women responded to and negotiated various religious, cultural and literary conventions that shaped their understandings of motherhood and mourning. Her narrative illustrates the various ways in which individual women challenged cultural norms and helped usher in new forms of emotional and literary expression. Comparisons of Wister’s narrative to other eighteenth-century women’s writings on grief and mourning further illuminate the interplay between cultural convention and individual expression.
This article examines the variety of educational opportunities available to New Jersey women in the first half of the nineteenth century. While largely ignored in the national historiography on women"s education, numerous groundbreaking schools for women were established throughout New Jersey in the early nineteenth century. The Newark Academy offered instruction to women since the late eighteenth century; its successor, the Newark Institute for Young Ladies, referred to its curriculum as "collegiate" decades before women were admitted to colleges. In the 1830s, the Bloomfield Female Seminary maintained a reputation for scholarly excellence; throughout the 1840s, the Mount Holly Female Seminary offered a course of study for women seeking to become teachers. By the 1840s, schools could be found in various cities and towns, including Bloomfield, Bordentown, Burlington, Freehold, Lawrenceville, Newark, New Brunswick, Rahway, and Raritan. The New Jersey schools examined in this essay shed light on both local and national practices of women"s education. As women"s access to education expanded, so did debates about the appropriate uses of education. While many men supported women"s education, women understood that they could be subject to criticism from those who feared the consequences of their intellectual pursuits. Analysis of the forms, purposes, and uses of women"s education, as evident in these New Jersey case studies, illustrates both the opportunities and challenges that teachers, students, and supporters faced as they sought to expand women"s institutional access to education.
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