A Means of Honorable Support: Art and Music in Women's Education in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

“The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment,” stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare “pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists.” This statement reveals some of the vocational options for women that were concomitant with the increased popularity of music and art education in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. Practical vocational concerns, along with notions of refinement and respectable entertainment, all were aspects of the impetus for music and art education. Preparing young women for occupations, whether as teachers of art and music or as commercial artists or musicians, was a particularly prominent component of education for women in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

“Advanced Marriage Technique”: Sex as a Perfectible Skill in Mid-twentieth-century American Marriage Manuals

“…But it could also serve an important social function as a marker of middle-class identity or refinement. 75 Cultivating a musical talent, outside of a particular vocational intention, could be construed as a form of self-discipline and selfimprovement in and of itself, though one that remained strongly coded as female through the early twentieth century. 76 Sex manuals, as Laura Tarzia has noted, took musical performance as a ready point of reference for the practical virtues of developing a difficult skill.…”