Carey, Janet Eldred and Peter Mortensen. "Gender and Writing Instruction in Early America: Lessons from Didactic Fiction." Rhetoric Review 12.1 (1993), 25-53.

Eldred and Mortensen address the dearth of eighteenth century composition research, citing such rare exceptions as Dennis Baron's Grammar and Good Taste. They examine the period between the American Revolution and the "rise of the Republican Mother and female academies in the last decades of the 1700s," with special interest paid to letters, novels and other such forums for female rhetoric (27).

Hannah Webster Foster's instructive novel, The Boarding School, is described as "at least one woman's imagined ideal of composition instruction for women in the new nation" (28). Foster's preceptress character tells anecdotes meant to fill young girls with virtue, guard them against the seducer's rhetoric, impress upon them the danger of illiteracy. Eldred and Mortensen argue that Foster turns sensationalism to the purpose of highlighting its opposite, morality.

Eldred and Mortenson discuss the female academies after the Revolution, before which girls were often compelled to read, but not to write. Female academies were a form of secondary education for women, offering academic and not ornamental studies. Foster's fictional boarding school, Harmony Grove, boasted a curriculum of "physical exercise, productive free time, moral lessons, and academic instruction" (35). The idea was to cultivate reason, not rote learning. "The aim of a woman's education is twofold: to be an interesting conversant, even in the company of men, and to be a teacher of young children" (43). Further, the authors claim that Foster meant to show society's responsibility for women's performance, and discredit the popular logic that women are defective by nature.

The epistolary form, write Eldred and Mortensen, was particularly prominent as an art which women could perfect. Letter-writing guides like Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind encouraged morality and craft in correspondence, which was meant to be public more than personal.

The authors conclude that Foster's text is a useful supplement to factual primary source material and a "point of departure for inquiring into multiple forms of literacy" in 1790s Connecticut (44). Final reflections are made on the develoment of the Carnegie Center of Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky.

Entered by Sarah on 28 July 2004 at 10:42 AM.