I go to see my mother every day, and I tell her about the children. A little colored girl living with her hears me, and she brought vividly to my mind how your teaching me widens out to many others; for when I remarked to my mother that my children told every new thing they learned at home, the girl said ‘And I teacher it to the hands,’—the colored people in the
‘quarters.’—Anonymous Student, 1892
Soon after Anna Ticknor died in October 1896, one of her long-standing students from Savannah, Georgia opined: “…Miss Ticknor was emphatically my Alma Mater; she supplied all that my natural mother (talented as she was) could not give; and whatever is worthy in my character or daily life, whatever is my success as a teacher, is largely due to her.”71 As alma mater, the nurturing mother, Ticknor worked within and through the home to foster intellectual outlets for her Society students. All the while she persisted in using the traditional and gendered language of domesticity to describe her work and her goals. Each year that the Society celebrated its birthday with a joyful gathering and status report,
Ticknor reiterated what she claimed was her exclusive interest in nurturing women’s domestic lives. Society studies, according to Ticknor, should not encourage students to ignore their responsibilities in the home, their “natural sphere.” 72 And even as increasing numbers of educated women began to enter the work force and their career choices expanded beyond school teaching alone, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home held steady in its assertion that: “It is the home we are working for” and that “whatever our share in the much discussed higher education of women, our doctrine is always that…there can be no higher earthly aim in her education than that of fitting her to elevate the
character and increase the resources of the home.”73 As Ticknor stated it, then, the Society encouraged women to daydream about Shakespeare or botany while washing the dishes— “Its mistress may labor with her own hands in its service, but while she sews, or cooks, or scrubs, her mind is cheered by thoughts of the subject she is studying”—but it stopped short of encouraging them to use such subjects to transcend their roles as wives and mothers.74
Anna Ticknor’s insistent rhetoric of women’s “natural” domestic duties and her modest educational aims belies the actual workings of her Society, both in its innovative epistolary pedagogy and in the actual use its students made of their studies. In fact,
Ticknor’s students, engaged and eager as they were to share their learning, often strayed far beyond the home and translated their learning from the relatively private sphere of a two- person correspondence into a wider network of learning in the schoolroom, in the reading
72 “Society to Encourage Studies at Home,” Twelfth Annual Report (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill,
1883), 12.
73Twentieth Annual Report, 6; “Society to Encourage Studies at Home,” Tenth Annual Report (Boston:
Rockwell & Churchill, 1883), 12.
club parlor, and in the popular press. Ticknor did not prohibit or even discourage this circulation—or use—of her Society’s lessons, but her unceasing reiteration of its domestic aims at first glance suggests a deep-seeded ambivalence about the role that educated women should and would play in the final years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it reveals an implicit clash between the Society’s stated aims and its actual results.
Anna Ticknor began her enterprise by diligently policing its structural, political, and rhetorical appearance. She strove to avoid charges of implementing “anything technical or learned,” adjectives that could suggest gender transgressions.75 Though Ticknor and other blue-blooded Boston women conceptualized, organized, and implemented the Society, they invited Samuel Eliot (Ticknor’s cousin) to serve as its chairman and oversee its quarterly meetings and annual gatherings. His presence, they hoped, would “add dignity and weight to these occasions,” revealing their own anxiety about the insufficient authority of a society created for and by women alone.76 This structural decision also entailed Ticknor’s appointment of herself as “secretary” (a
designation apparently in name only). Ticknor, though, was quick to defend Samuel Eliot’s role when Horace Scudder, the prominent American editor, began publishing notices of her work (i.e. not Eliot’s) in the Churchman. She insisted: “Our chairman does much more than preside at our Annual Meeting. He presides at our frequent committee meetings, has an important voice in the selection of books, and is continually consulted on other
75 Ibid., 8.
matters, indeed we depend very much on his judgment and advice.”77 Drawing on the language of female dependence to reassure Scudder (and by extension the American reading public) that she was not up to radical initiatives, Ticknor carefully praises Eliot in order to displace the Society’s authority from herself to a suitable man, even as all extant records indicate that she always tightly held the Society’s reins.
Horace Scudder’s “mistaken” account of the Society as solely Ticknor’s initiative signified the dangers of public notice. She initially strongly resisted all published accounts of her work in a cultural moment still uncomfortable about what to do with highly
educated women (such learning remained a potential liability to one’s marriage prospects). Hoping to avoid scandal of any sort, Ticknor insisted during her formulation of her program that, “home study for women should be as little as possible associated with public notice and external excitement” and that it “would not be healthily affected by…public comment or applause, any more than by the artificial excitement of open competition, certainly not if we should seek it ourselves.”78 Here the priority is on the efficacy of study
itself, as the Society as a financial enterprise would certainly have been “healthily affected” by “public comment or applause.” But as much as Ticknor hoped to keep the press at bay, after The Atlantic Monthly ran a two-page acclamatory report about the “exceedingly
effective” Society in September 1875, the floodgates were open for the publication of hundreds of other newspaper stories promoting the Boston program. This advertising of
77 Anna Ticknor, “To Horace Scudder,” October 3, 1875, Papers of the Society to Encourage
Studies at Home, Boston Public Library, Boston.
78 “Society to Encourage Studies at Home,” Eighth Annual Report (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill,
sorts multiplied the number of students each term thereafter.79 Eventually, Ticknor slowly
came to accept publicity as a fait accompli and, in fact, such notice seemed to her proof of the educational necessity of her Society.
The newspaper accounts of the Society lauded it as: “the lifting up of education to a point higher than showy accomplishments,” and others asked, “should not [it] be copied indefinitely?”80 Cautioning her members in light of such encomium, Anna Ticknor reminded her teachers, students, and the public that the program would always remain firmly centered in the home. In fact, for the first nine years, Ticknor ran it out of her own parlor, allowing herself no latitude for hypocrisy. Any domestic revolution that she
initiated would happen without her leaving her own house. But when nearly 1,000
students enrolled in 1881-1882, she relented: “the Society, after enjoying the hospitality of a private house for its head-quarters for nine years, should establish itself, in a modest way, in hired rooms.”81 In the same breath that Ticknor announced her move to “hired rooms,” she also raised the tuition from $2 to $3, a change that may well have hastened the
decreasing enrollments in the years after 1882.82 For Anna Ticknor this transition from
79 “Education,” The Atlantic Monthly 36 (1875): 372-373. Though this article appears anonymously,
in a letter to Horace Scudder in August 1876, Anna Ticknor thanks him for his “pleasant notices of our Society in the Scribners and Atlantic.” From 1875 to 1889, The Atlantic Monthly published at least six articles on the Society.
80The Herald, 6 June 1880; New York Times, 31 January 1877; New York Tribune, 9 Sept. 1875. 81 “Society to Encourage Studies at Home,” Ninth Annual Report (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill,
1882), 11.
82 In the same year, women’s private colleges such as Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley charged $250-
450 (between $5,230 and $9,415 in today’s dollar). By comparison, a year’s tuition in Ticknor’s Society would cost $42 (pre-1882) and $63 (post-1881) in today’s dollar. Samuel H. Williamson, "Six Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790 to Present,"
“home labor” to more commercial labor (with new attention to costs) and its negative effects on enrollment may well have signified the dangers of women overreaching their sphere of influence. Nevertheless, she continued to explicitly advocate for the local while her students enacted the global exchange of knowledge. Such apparent ambivalence, however, veils the much more common historical dilemma of individuals (especially women) working for systematic change in the face of a dominant culture of resistance.
The case of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott illuminates this very tension. Working in a culture unwilling to accommodate his extremist ways, Bronson, we recall, was run out of his Temple School because of his pedagogical radicalism. Learning from her father’s mistakes of stridency, Louisa disguised her own progressive—and radical—pedagogy in what appeared to be a relatively conservative form, the domestic novel. In that genre she was able to forward her dynamic instruction without garnering the public vitriol that her father faced. Likewise, in her biography of Catherine Beecher, Katherine Kish Sklar succinctly names this paradox of progress in terms of her subject’s “skill in altering the forms of her own culture even while she insisted that she was preserving them.”83 Anna Ticknor, like Beecher before her, developed just such a keen sense of how best to facilitate educational change. Her strategies hinged on her ability to maintain the Society’s guise of domestic preservation (thus preventing dismissive charges of women’s rights radicalism) while enabling her students—women who were not necessarily publicly affiliated with the
83 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (W. W. Norton &
Company, 1976), 72. Mary Kelley identified a similar practice in antebellum female academies that maintained the language of republican motherhood which, in turn, “licensed a more expansive gendered republicanism that women had been deploying in civil society since the end of the eighteenth century.” Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 102.
Society—to implement change in both their local and national communities.84 By translating their private epistolary experience into other genres of learning, the Society students then made public both new ways of knowing and new knowledge.
* * * *
The exchange of letters between two geographically—though not emotionally— separated women was the Society’s principal teaching method. This process directly educated 7,086 students in twenty-four years; however, this number reveals only the beginning of the Society’s much larger contribution to American education. The letter’s original audience of one easily multiplied when the recipient shared her learning: in the parlor, in the schoolhouse, in the press, and in the clubroom. The most common path for such sharing was the bloodline within the family. The late-century vestiges of the ideology of republican motherhood meant that student-mothers translated Society lessons into material for their children. Schoolteachers shared their learning with their young pupils in the nation’s classrooms, and clubwomen exchanged their knowledge with one another in parlors and local libraries. Though perhaps more oblique in method, the popular press also became an outlet for many students to publish and circulate their learning in short fictions and essays, effectively making the American reading public the recipients of the Society’s
84 Ticknor did support her students’ circulation of their learning. In a February 1877 letter to
student “B.P.D.” Ticknor explained: “…You say you do not let your neighbors know of your studies, lest they suspect you of neglecting your duties. It seems to me that, by this time, they must have practical demonstration of the performance of your duties; and, by silence about pursuits which they might be induced to share, you are to some extent, great or small, depriving them of an interest and incentive. Few can be supposed to be likely to share or to profit by the Goethe studies, but the wholesome English reading would, if they could be lured to it, improve and lift their characters, through their intelligence. You ought to be a missionary, and open their eyes gradually to the beauty and refreshment of some higher intellectual interest than a newspaper or a magazine.” Anna Ticknor to “B.P.D.”, Boston, 21 February 1877. Papers of the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, Boston Public Library, Boston.
lessons. In each of these increasingly disseminated modes of transmission—and with missionary zeal—Society members articulated the lessons they learned for a new audience, often shifting learning genres along the way.
When a Society reading assignment, such as the Life of Benjamin Franklin, became a schoolroom lecture about American invention, Ticknor’s students who had engaged in private correspondence marked by intimacy and trust converted their knowing to more public forms of discourse. In this kind of knowledge rendering, they synthesized the material gleaned in their individual relationships with Society teachers and library books into new pedagogical scenarios. This transmission suggests great flexibility in the students’ conceptions of learning. Consequently, they introduced revised methods of instruction with expanded curricular offerings for diverse audiences, from aging fathers to students in the postbellum South. These women treated their epistolary educations as material to be shared, instead of the material for self-advancement alone. Indeed, if intimacy structured the original epistolary exchange, generosity structured its circulation.
Maternal dissemination was the most ubiquitous means of knowledge circulation from the Society. Mothers who studied botany or American history with the far-flung correspondents replicated the process of shared learning and created new curriculums for their children (and sometimes for their parents as well). By the 1870’s this kind of mother- teaching had a long, established history in America.85 From the late eighteenth century onward, mothers across the country had conceived of their own education as an enabling force in the development of their children. The learned and unmarried republican woman
85 See Sarah Robbins, Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women's Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
represented, according to Linda Kerber, “an unenviable anomaly.”86 With children, though, she could use her knowledge to perform a “great service to the Republic”: the raising up virtuous male citizens.87 The instruction of sons—and eventually daughters as the century wore on—became a way to justify useful and improved female education. Not surprisingly, then, Society students frequently reported mobilizing their epistolary learning to instruct their offspring in their newly acquired disciplines. Boston’s Sunday Herald took note of this trend when it lauded the Society as “reach[ing] far and wide,” confirming the “old saying…that men are mainly what their mothers make them, and this society is educating and training our mothers of today and our mothers yet to be.”88
The act of mother-teaching was not particular to Ticknor’s society, but the content of the lessons often was. An 1878 student in the English Literature division confessed that since her own enrollment, her children (of both genders) had “forsaken Mother Goose, and neglect[ed] Hans Andersen while all the bedtime stories must be about the lovely Lady Una, with her milk-white lamb, or the brave Red-Cross Knight.” Exchanging Andersen for Spencer, a decidedly more sophisticated curriculum, this student enabled her children to imaginatively inhabit the Fairie Queene instead of reciting nightly nursery rhymes: “As we were gathering ferns and flowers in the woods, I heard his sister question him as to whether, if we should meet the dragon there, he would be brave enough to be our Red-
86 Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 190.
87 Ibid., 10.
88The Sunday Herald, Boston, 9 June 1878, n.p. Included in an 1878 Society scrapbook in the
Cross Knight.”89 This child’s contemplation of a bodily inhabitation of the Spenserian hero suggests the way that this Society student animated her own learning while reconfiguring the traditional home curriculum.
The Society not only influenced the lessons students passed down to their children, but it also gave rise to lessons passed up to their parents and over to their spouses. An 1883 student described a kind of inverted mode of hereditary learning that the Society indirectly created: “My father became interested in my work, and the books I read were a source of great pleasure to him…He was a professional man, not much given to reading outside of his specialty, and the Boston course opened up to him something entirely new.”90 Likewise, another student in the same year described how she and her spouse shared in Society learning: “my husband and I have been helped over many lonely hours by the books needed for study.”91 In both of these instances, daughters and wives shepherded the adult men in their lives through broader curriculums, nurturing their learning and expanding the single-gender constituency of the Society. Indeed, such sharing of Society material forged intellectual bonds between family members, with women significantly serving as the fount of the new knowledge. Their doing so suggests the value these women—and their family members—ascribed to their studies. Not only were the readings worthy of
89 “Society to Encourage Studies at Home,” Fifth Annual Report (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill,
1878), 14.
90 “Society to Encourage Studies at Home,” Tenth Annual Report (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill,
1883), 5.
transmission to children, but they were also valuable to those with greater access to educational opportunity (the professional father and the interested spouse).92
At times, such transmission extended beyond the immediate family. An 1892 correspondent described how her own Society work filtered to her extended family and then transformed the pedagogical strategies of a cousin, “a rather clever and educated fellow, [who] became so interested in my work that…he organized a class of younger persons for the study of American history. I gave him the benefit of your lists and maps… He put them through on such original lines, making them think instead of cram facts, that the results quite dazzle them. They do not know it, but they are all S.H.-ers.”93 In this case,