Women Philosophers Volume I: Education and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America 9781350070592, 9781350070622, 9781350070608

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WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS VOLUME I

ALSO AVAILABLE AT BLOOMSBURY

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, ed. Cheri Lynne Carr and Janae Sholtz Why Iris Murdoch Matters, Gary Browning The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie: Materialism and Mortality, ed. Daniel Whistler and Victoria Browne Philosophy and Vulnerability: Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion, and Audre Lorde, Matthew R. McLennan

WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS VOLUME I Education and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

DOROTHY ROGERS

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Dorothy G. Rogers, 2020 Dorothy G. Rogers has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover images: Sculpture: La Pensadora by José Luis Fernández (© Teo Moreno / Alamy Stock Photo) Letters: Tolga Tezcan / 211A / 1970s / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-7059-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7060-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-7061-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments  vi About the cover  xii

1 Introduction: Women, Diversity, and Philosophy in North America 1 2 Pedagogy, Philosophy, and “Spiritual Motherhood”: Susan Blow, Mary Church Terrell, Josephine Silone Yates, Emma Johnson Goulette 23 3 Feminist Philosophers/Educators: Anna Brackett, Grace Bibb, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Ana Roqué 67 4 Audacious Women!—Four Independent Scholars: Margaret Mercer, Maria Stewart, Pauline Johnson, Ellen Mitchell 111 5 Feminist Activists/Theorists: Lucia Ames Mead, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Luisa Capetillo 149 Notes 191 References 221 Index 231

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the years after America’s First Women Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel appeared in print, I discovered new materials and archival sources. This prompted me to consider a relatively minor revision of the book. Editors at Bloomsbury Press were interested in the project, and we agreed to proceed. The plan was to update the text a bit and move the two women who earned doctoral degrees, Marietta Kies and Eliza Sunderland, to a companion volume on the first women in academic philosophy. The plan seemed straightforward enough. Then the matter of diversity— both geographic and racial/cultural—came under discussion. First, editors at Bloomsbury pointed out that “America” includes more than simply the United States. Therefore, either the title of this revised volume should note that the women under discussion did indeed remain within the confines of that nation, or the work should include women in other regions in North America. Next, an anonymous proposal reviewer made a simple observation that led me to— well—an epiphany of sorts: “I notice that this work does not include racialized women.” I had committed the classic error that is so common among those of us who have been raised within the dominant culture. We too often assume that a small subset of people of European descent can speak for the whole as a “generic” or “universal” voice. For the majority of my life, I have rebelled against this tendency as it relates to sexism and patriarchal dominance. Yet I completely missed it in regard to race/culture in my research and writing on women in philosophy, which I committed myself to over twenty years ago. In combination, these two nudges toward inclusion made me realize that significant revisions were necessary. In chronological order, I must first thank editors at Bloomsbury for leading me to expand my previous work

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geographically. Discussions of pedagogy, philosophy, and activism were taking place throughout North America in the nineteenth century. Including Canadian, Mexican, and Caribbean developments in the current volume has greatly enriched the work. Sincere and profound thank yous are also due to the anonymous reviewer who helped me realize that my previous work on a small coterie of European-heritage women was far less than inclusive. Her firm, but considerate, criticism of this aspect of the proposal led me to completely reevaluate the original group of white women I had researched in regard to inclusion and exclusion. Before undertaking what became a fairly significant revision of the current volume, I read works by women across races and cultures. I considered the ideas of each of the women in this volume on their intellectual merit. I also considered the work of each woman in relation to her influence and legacy within her own culture. Finally, I considered the ideas of these women in dialogue—even though in most cases they were unable or unwilling to cross lines of race and/or culture. A historical reality impacts the discussion that follows: women of European descent entered intellectual discourse before women of color had opportunities that allowed them to do so. This is simply an inescapable fact. Susan Blow, for instance, led the discussion of early childhood education and was considered the authority on the topic for decades. Yet, even in such cases, my aim in this work has been to decenter both the masculine perspective and the European perspective. Hopefully I have succeeded in doing so. I will always be grateful to my dissertation advisor and committee members at Boston University for their support as I undertook research on women in the history of philosophy—what would become the focus of my academic work for the next two decades: James Schmidt, Hugh Baxter, and Klaus Brinkmann. James Schmidt first pointed me to discussion of women in the St. Louis idealist movement in the United States by William Goetzmann. He also dismissed my concerns about doing work on women who were “only” pedagogical theorists. Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel all discussed pedagogy as an important branch of philosophy, he said. No need to

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worry about that—especially when the discussion is among women, for whom pedagogy was one of few career options in the nineteenth century. Both James Schmidt and Hugh Baxter provided excellent real-life examples of academics with success in cross-disciplinary career paths—Dr. Schmidt in both political science and philosophy and Dr. Baxter in both philosophy and law. Their perspectives and influence have been helpful as I’ve researched women whose work does not fit neatly into disciplinary categories within this volume. The late Klaus Brinkmann (1944–2016) made sure my work remained true to its rootedness in the continental tradition, despite being transplanted to the United States. I thank my editors at Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm for this project and their helpful directives along the way. Frankie Mace helped get the project underway and facilitated the proposal review process. Lisa Goodrum helped finalize the review process and addressed technical issues. Claire Weatherhead provided guidance on the permissions process. Charlotte Daniels is to be lauded for her cover design talents. Lucy Russell deserves special thanks for her ongoing editorial help and organizational energy, especially during the final stages of the publication process. Many sections of the original book, America’s First Women Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel, 1860-1925 (Continuum Publishing, 2005), appear virtually unchanged in this volume; they are used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. I remain thankful to a host of individuals who assisted with my research on the original group of women in the late 1990s and early 2000s: Dina Young, archivist at the Missouri Historical Society, and Charles Brown of the St. Louis Mercantile Library provided me with access to a wealth of material on the St. Louis movement. Jean Gosebrink, archivist at the St. Louis Public Library; Lois Waniger, of the Carondelet Historical Society in St. Louis; and Madeline Mullin, archivist at the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School all supported my efforts to locate Susan Blow’s correspondence. Material related to Anna Brackett was provided by Marilyn Manzella and Marilyn Coombs of the alumni office at Framingham State College, and Carol Foster at the college’s

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library. Dierdre Hollingshed, Greta Ober-Beauchesne, and Aleks Stankovic, of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), made every effort to learn more about the ACA/AAUW scholarship established in Brackett’s name. Diane Kaplan readily provided me with access to correspondence from Brackett and other women in the Thomas Davidson Papers at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Many are to be thanked for helping to locate important information about Ellen Mitchell: Steve Fisher, archivist at the University of Denver; Judy Haven, of the Onondaga (New York) Historical Association; Sandy Steck, of the Onondaga County Public Library; Anita Wright of the Cortland County (New York) Historical Society; and Glynis T. Hawkins, a student friend from graduate school, for energetically conducting on-site research at the Denver Public Library, thus unearthing important archival material. I was delighted to be contacted by Jill Ladd, a descendant of Ellen Mitchell’s family, who is as enthusiastic about her great-great aunt’s work as a thinker and public intellectual as I am. My thanks to her for sharing her discoveries about Mitchell’s life and career path, especially Mitchell’s closeness to Julia Ward Howe and her teaching at Syracuse University in the late 1890s. Ms. Ladd also shared a photograph of Mitchell from a local periodical that is no longer extant and looped me in on online conversations with other family descendants and local historians, including Richard Papworth and Sharon LaDuke, in Onondaga County. I appreciate the excellent work Jeanne Robbins produced on African American women and early childhood education, especially Mary Church Terrell and Josephine Silone Yates. I thank her for her willingness to discuss our work via e-mail and to read sections of my discussion as related to racial/ cultural inclusion. Immense thanks go to librarians and archivists, especially, Meredith Elsik, at Trinity College and Steve Locy and Helen Clements at Oklahoma State University Library, who scoured all available online and print sources to locate hard-to-find materials by Native American women. I am thankful to

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my husband, Ira Smith, for his heroic efforts to find work by Rachel Caroline Eaton that is no longer extant. I am especially grateful to Christina Berry at All Things Cherokee and Martha Berry of Berry Beadwork, descendants of Rachel Caroline Eaton’s family, for welcoming my inquiries about Eaton and other women in Native American thought. I have appreciated numerous opportunities to exchange ideas with colleagues, near and far. An invitation to the Libori Summer Institute at the Center for the History of Women in Philosophy at the University of Paderborn resulted in a number of productive discussions. Many thanks to Ruth Hagengruber and Mary Ellen Waithe for the invitation to participate in this inspiring program— and to Mary Ellen, who has become a valued mentor, colleague, and friend, for sharing the podium with me in our class on American women philosophers. My work would not be possible without the support and encouragement I’ve received close to home. Talented students at Montclair State University provided assistance along the way: Elijah Whitten in the Modern Languages Department translated a newly discovered article from German into English, saving me a great deal of time. Amanda Nardone in Gender Studies proofread, copy edited, and provided feedback on early drafts of selected chapters of this volume. Other talented assistants and (for now) hard-working barristas, Eliza White and Erica Rankin, helped proofread the final draft. Librarians at Montclair State have been readily available whenever a research inquiry arises: Interlibrary loan staff have quietly, but efficiently, worked behind the scenes to locate even the most elusive and obscure nineteenth-century texts. Catherine Baird, Eduardo Gil, and William Vincenti have happily provided assistance whenever needed. Reference librarian, Siobhan McCarthy, has been eager to help on many occasions, locating several hard-to-find items. Colleagues at Montclair State have been supportive throughout the research and writing process: Mark Clatterbuck, Maureen Corbeski, Laura Nicosia, Denise O’Shea, Jessica Restaino, John Soboslai, Jeff Strickland, Kate Temoney, and Jason Williams each deserve recognition for exchanging ideas and/or providing

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feedback when I’ve shared my research finds, queries, and/or new revelations with them. Finally, I thank my life partner, Ira L. Smith, and our daughter, Alma. Ira has tirelessly supported me in my research on women in philosophy and encouraged me to pursue it from day one. Both he and Alma have cheerfully allowed me to hold many at-home discussions about my various discoveries and ideas throughout the research and writing process. I thank them both for this—as well as for putting up with the stacks of books, piles of papers, and uncapped pens that migrated from my desk to the dining table or kitchen counter all too often. You two are the best!

ABOUT THE COVER

The book cover was designed by Charlotte Daniels, Bloomsbury Publishers, using the image of one of many Woman Thinker statues considered for this volume: La Pensadora, in Plaza del Carbayón in Oviedo, Spain, by Jose Luis Fernandez. The letter collage depicts correspondence between women discussed in this volume and male contemporaries, from left to right: Grace Bibb to William Torrey Harris, inquiring about career and publication options after leaving her position at the University of Missouri to marry and raise children (January 28, 1884): “. . . were exactly the right position offered, I should take it, even though it involved absence from home part of the year—this is however aside from my inquiry as to the chances for a work on Rousseau . . . .” Used with permission from William Torrey Harris Papers, Missouri Historical Society. Lucia Ames Mead to William Torrey Harris, requesting academic guidance and providing an overview of her studies (September 20, 1878): “I have read your ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ eight times, also Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of History,’ a volume of Fichte, + various articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy . . . .” Used with permission from William Torrey Harris Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Ellen Mitchell to Thomas Davidson, updating him on her recent professional activities (March 15, 1890): “I am to give a lecture on Aristotle's Politics on the 5th of May. Audacious woman! I hear you exclaim. Perhaps so, but I have been studying Aristotle for a long time . . . .” Used with permission from Thomas Davidson Papers, Beinecke Library archives, Yale University. Susan Blow to James Jackson Putnam, noting recent developments in philosophy (December 26, 1908): “What a remarkable article Prof. James has

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written on Hegel. He may be a shining light of Hegelianism yet.” Used with permission from James Jackson Putnam papers, Countway Library, Harvard University Medical School. Anna Brackett to Thomas Davidson (February 15, 1871): “New form of syllogism: a. Have you a picture of Margaret Fuller? b. Is it in a lendable form? c. Will you lend it to me for a week or two?” Used with permission from Thomas Davidson Papers, Beinecke Library archives, Yale University.

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1 Introduction Women, Diversity, and Philosophy in North America

The Project This book grows out of a core conviction that philosophy has lacked both gender diversity and cultural diversity for far too long. As a result, branches of thought that have been disproportionately populated by women and minorities in North America—pedagogical theory, philosophy of religion, feminist thought, critical race theory,1 social/political reform theories, and philosophies of relationship (maternal love, altruism, and care)—have been underrepresented in the discipline. In the interest of not only enriching philosophy but also providing a more comprehensive and accurate account of its development, we need to seek diversity and aim for inclusion. This task requires attending to intellectual, social, and political history. In fact, I maintain that attention to the larger social/political context is essential to thorough philosophical work. One could say that philosophy without intellectual history is empty and without social/political history is blind. Our first step must be to recognize how very masculine and Eurocentric the philosophical tradition has been. Our next step must be to ask why. In discussions of philosophy, from ancient times to the present, why don’t we include women and cultural minorities? When we discuss the pre-Socratics,

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why do we do so without including women in the Pythagorean school—of whom there were several? Why are the pedagogical insights of Aristotle, Locke, and Rousseau accepted as deeply philosophical, while discussions of education by Margaret Mercer or Susan Blow have remained on library shelves? Why has Machiavelli’s egoistic understanding of governance been lauded as a critical moment in political thought, while Christine de Pizan’s communitarian ideals and Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s calls for justice have been ignored? Why are the so-called proofs of God’s existence still bandied about in philosophy of religion texts, while cosmos-shattering ideas about God in relation to race and gender in the late twentieth century are often absent from anthologies? As I undertook a revision of my initial work on the first women in philosophical idealism in the United States, a reviewer’s observation brought me to a screeching halt: “I notice that this work does not include racialized women.” This led to my own self-reckoning. How could I have done this? I’d committed the very same error that I have found so vexing: the omission of voices outside “mainstream” philosophy. Why had I included only EuropeanAmerican women in my original work? Because I wanted to explore women’s understanding of the public/private split—the notion that men are meant for the world of business and politics, while women are meant for hearth and home—and I was working with a relatively narrow definition of philosophy. The public/private split had its earliest origins in Aristotle, was absorbed into popular culture in the early modern period, and was reinforced by Hegel in the nineteenth century.2 I wanted to explore what women in that era had to say about their role and rights in relation to the split. In order to do so properly, my advisor and I determined that I would have to find nineteenth-century women who read Hegel. He soon pointed me in the direction of the St. Louis neo-Hegelians, and my research was underway.3 What I found at that time was a relatively small collective of white women in the United States who drew on German idealist thought, primarily as related to education, and who represented many “firsts” on the North American

INTRODUCTION  3

continent: Susan Elizabeth Blow, early childhood education theorist, was the first person to successfully put in place an ongoing and publicly funded kindergarten program in the United States. She was also one of the first women to serve as director of a public education program in a large city (1873–84). Anna Brackett, feminist and proponent of professionalizing teacher education, was one of the first US women to serve as principal of a secondary school (1863–72). Grace C. Bibb, also a feminist and teacher education advocate, was one of the first women in the United States to serve as dean of a college at a public university (1879–84). Ellen Mitchell, another feminist and primarily an independent scholar, was one of the first women in the United States to teach philosophy at coeducational universities (1890–92; 1898–99). Lucia Ames Mead was among a core group of women who were the first to read and discuss the ideas of Kant on international peace and arbitration, and urge for the implementation of those ideas in public life (1899–1935). Marietta Kies and Eliza Sunderland (now discussed in volume two) were among the first ten women in the United States to earn doctoral degrees in philosophy from any university (in 1891 and 1892, respectively). It is clear that some of these women knew each other quite well. Blow, Brackett, and Mitchell were all active in St. Louis, Missouri, between 1867 and 1872, for instance. Brackett, Mitchell, Ames Mead, Kies, and Sunderland attended some of the same salons and summer school programs, referred to each other’s work, and/or corresponded. Each of these women also knew the man who is often considered the leader of the early philosophical idealist movement in the United States—William Torrey Harris (1835–1909). Yet, following search after search, I unearthed no evidence that any of these individuals developed relationships across the harsh racial and cultural divides that existed in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century. Susan Blow provided kindergarten training to at least two African American women, but does not seem to have maintained a relationship with either of them, as she did with other students. Blow’s father and uncle were staunch abolitionists. In the 1850s, her uncle purchased the freedom of at

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least two slaves and was said to have helped fund Dred Scott’s lawsuit for his freedom. An extended family member of Anna Brackett, William Greenleaf Eliot, a liberal Unitarian minister in St. Louis, harbored a runaway slave and engaged in a standoff with local officials, rather than deliver him back into forced servitude. Yet, none of these women appear to have discussed the evils of slavery in writing, helped combat racism, or contributed to Reconstruction efforts following the Civil War. The world they lived in was fully segregated, and they appear to have accepted this as the status quo. Without any clear links between this original group of thinkers and communities of color, I then cast a wider net. Thanks to recovery of the writings of African American women by Henry Louis Gates in the Schomburg Collection,4 I had already accessed work by women of African descent and had sought out writings by women of Native American and Latina heritage as well. So, I retrieved the notes and copies of documents in my files and went to work. I looked for women of color who, even if not directly linked to the early idealist movement in the United States, had studied philosophy in the nineteenth century. What I learned shouldn’t be surprising: If it was uncommon for women of European descent to study, translate, and/or discuss the works of men in the philosophical canon in the nineteenth century, it was even more uncommon for women of color to have done so. The barriers and biases that existed throughout much of North America in that time were too great for many women of color to overcome. After earnest and lengthy searches, my options were either to accept the exclusion of diverse voices in philosophy—and contribute to it by leaving my list of women philosophers unchanged—or to further question that exclusion and challenge the Eurocentric bias in the discipline. For me the decision was obvious: Continue to challenge. Continue to aim for inclusion. My goal shifted now to including women across races and cultures throughout the continent (“America” including more than simply the United States, as my editor diplomatically noted) who shared intellectual and social/ political interests, goals, and ideals that were the same or similar to the group I’d originally researched twenty years ago. These are also women of many

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“firsts”—Mary Church Terrell and Josephine Silone Yates were the first African American women to study and promote kindergarten education in the United States; Emma Johnson Goulette was the first Native American woman to do the same. Fanny Jackson Coppin was the first woman of African descent to serve as principal of a secondary school in the United States. Dolores Correa and Rita Cetina, leaders of the first wave of feminism in Mexico, were the first proponents of normal school training for women in their country. Ana Roqué, also a feminist, was the first woman to become principal of a normal school and teach at a university in Puerto Rico. Maria Stewart, a proponent of racial uplift through spiritual renewal and women’s advancement, was the first African American woman to author a book on social/political theory. E. Pauline Johnson, a Mohawk woman in Canada, was an advocate for indigenous and women’s rights at the end of the nineteenth century. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was one of the first thinkers/activists to develop a critical race theory in and through her campaign against vigilante justice in the United States. Luisa Capetillo was a feminist and one of the first female labor activists in Puerto Rico and the United States.

Criteria for Inclusion When confronting the absence of women in philosophy, in my view our first question needs to be: Why are there so few of them? The next is: Why include these women and not others? The most obvious answer to the first question—why the supposed shortage of women philosophers—is this: Philosophy has developed with a masculine and Eurocentric bias. There have been plenty of women in philosophy since ancient times, and there has been a good deal of research about them in recent decades.5 The second reason for women’s exclusion is that the term “philosopher” has been limited to either traditional canonical figures in the history of the Western masculine tradition or formally trained academics.

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Thus, a lack of access to intellectual centers of power has led to far fewer female voices across races and cultures in philosophical discourse. In the United States, women were not admitted to the majority of colleges and universities until the 1870s. Canada and Mexico were a decade or so behind, admitting women to formerly all-male institutions in the 1880s and 1890s. One exception throughout North America: normal schools, established to teach pedagogical theory and practice—an area of academic inquiry that was populated by women. However, elite colleges and universities in all three countries did not admit women until well into the twentieth century. Historical trends are an additional factor contributing to a supposed absence of women in philosophy. The first trend: With increasingly formal forms of education in the nineteenth century, the study of philosophy became less of an avocation and more of a professional enterprise that required specialized training. Philosophy soon came to be housed solely in a college or university. The second trend: Over time, discussions that were once considered elements of “philosophy” became their own independent and equally professional areas of study. These were areas of study that women were often attracted to, such as aesthetics, anthropology, pedagogy, psychology, religion, and sociology. This, combined with the increased professionalization of intellectual life, meant that other areas of inquiry that appealed to women, like feminism, womanism, and critical theories about race and culture, were set aside or ignored in academic philosophy. The third trend: Very early in the nineteenth century, women were “tracked” into specific areas of study that were often related to care-taking practices—primary education and nursing are prime examples. Women who studied education often thrived on developing pedagogical theory as an outgrowth of their practical work, but discussion of their ideas took place almost solely within education circles. Women who beat the odds and studied philosophy at an advanced level (whether formally or informally) and published their ideas often clustered into specific branches of the discipline— most often pedagogy, but also ethics/moral theory, social/political philosophy, or philosophy of religion.

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The question of which women to include in a study like this one is related to a larger question: Who can be called a “philosopher”? This question has long been a point of inquiry in the discipline. Some consider thinkers like Voltaire, Alexander Hamilton, Marx, and Emma Goldman philosophers. Others dismiss them, saying Voltaire is a “philosophe,” Hamilton a “political thinker,” Marx an economist (and a sloppy one at that), and Goldman only an “activist,” not a “thinker.” This question has troubled me as a feminist who has dedicated many years to research on women in the field. In part it is a matter of content and method; in part it is a matter of genre. Genre is the easier of the two matters to address. Generally speaking, I prefer to examine and discuss expository writing that aims to posit a theory or advance a perspective: essays, lectures and speeches, commentary, or analytical narratives. Because women were often socialized to be conciliatory, a style that involves argumentation is not a requirement. Women whose academic training or personal style was Western/masculine tended to employ argument. Anna Brackett, Ellen Mitchell, Lucia Ames Mead, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett are cases in point; none of these women seem to have feared verbal combat. But women like Margaret Mercer and Maria Stewart shied away from argument. Stewart draws on a religious prophetic tradition, and her writing reads more like a plea, with prayers interspersed in some cases. Mercer writes as a kindly teacher, using moral suasion as she guides her readers through the text. For the most part, Frances Jackson Coppin simply explained her pedagogical techniques, rather than making a case for their implementation. Hers is the only case in which I’ve included an approach to scholarship that is more narrative than analytical. I have done so because she was living and working at the intersection of pedagogical developments, racial/cultural advancements, and feminist/womanist explorations. And in this sense, her work can and should be analyzed as pedagogy by a woman of color for people of color in her era. There are parallels among other women in this volume, across race, class, and culture. In my view we can learn a great deal from Coppin, and others like her, today.

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I have not included women who worked within creative genres—poets, dramatists, novelists—simply because I find it difficult to work with poetic forms, allegory, parable, and the like. I know many very rigorous scholars who have done excellent scholarship on philosophers—male and female—who wrote in creative genres, however, and I hold their work in high regard.6 There is a close connection between genre and opportunity. As noted earlier, and in any number of works discussing the history of women in intellectual and professional life, women’s academic and professional options were extremely limited prior to the twentieth century. We often acknowledge this situation in the abstract but do not (it seems to me) adequately challenge and interrogate what it means for our understandings of philosophy—past, present, and future. If half of the women in this volume were unable to attend college, or even normal school—which was indeed the case—how did this shape their career paths? Among the twenty women discussed here, twelve worked as educators at some point in their careers, the majority of them teaching young children. Nine were social activists, journalists, or both. Just five taught at a college or university: Grace Bibb (University of Missouri), Francis Jackson Coppin (Institute for Colored Youth; now Cheyney University), Ellen Mitchell (University of Denver; Syracuse University), Ana Roqué (University of Puerto Rico), and Mary Church Terrell (Wilberforce University). Yet the obstacles women faced affected more than career development. The social placement of these women led nearly every one of them to focus primarily on social/political matters in their published work—education, justice, women and gender equity, and war/peace. Which women ventured beyond one of these areas of inquiry? Susan Blow, whose central interest was in pedagogical theory, also discussed epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics. Ellen Mitchell maintained a balance between her two main interests: feminism and the history of philosophy. Maria Stewart’s primary concern was with social justice issues, which she often discussed in and through religion. Margaret Mercer came the closest to matching traditional expectations of a philosopher, discussing epistemology, moral theory, and philosophy of religion in an early academic text. The fact

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that all but one of this subset of four women were of European descent speaks volumes. Perhaps the correlation between a person’s cultural placement and an affinity for “mainstream” (masculine) Eurocentric philosophy is greater than we might have guessed. So then, in this study, I have included public intellectuals, social reformers, political activists, and/or editors and journalists, who generally did not have opportunities to study philosophy formally. In many cases, their ideas first appeared in short-form publications—newspaper articles, booklets, pamphlets, and published speeches—rather than hefty tomes, precisely because women and minorities did not always have access to the circles in which intellectuals gathered, discussed ideas, then published, and promoted “important” work. Short-form publications were a main avenue for the exchange of ideas in public life, without the need for access to these elite networks. As Felix Matos observed in his discussion of Luisa Capetillo, women outside the dominant culture produced short-form publications out of necessity, but it also allowed them to demonstrate “political and class [or cultural] solidarity” and is “an example of marginalized subaltern writing” that is worthy of attention.7 My colleagues in philosophy may suggest that I have cast the net too wide. These women might better be appreciated as women of ideas or social theorists, but not “philosophers,” per se. Yet, I propose to explore their ideas and consider including them so as to transform philosophy.8 Social and political activists may have developed ideas that are more significant and informative than those of the intellectual elite that have been lauded through the centuries. For instance, as much as we might appreciate John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy, how can we square his theories of liberty and good governance with his entanglements in the East India Company and the legacy of colonialism? Should we trust the abstract concepts Mill put forth over the contextualized critiques provided by a woman like Luisa Capetillo, whose life was shaped by that colonial legacy? Ideas that are detached from lived experience can lead to theories that are unresponsive to the challenges we face in the real world. By contrast, social and political activism can lead to theories

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that equip us to address real-world issues. In my view, the latter leads to a much more rich and responsible philosophical discussion. So then, my criteria for inclusion: 1) Current (or traditional) philosophical discussions: Women who studied philosophy and/or branches of philosophy as we understand “philosophy” today. In the strictest sense, only Blow, Mercer, Mitchell, and perhaps Capetillo meet this criterion. 2) Previous philosophical discussions: Women who studied and discussed philosophy as it was understood in their day: analysis of literature, children’s cognitive and moral development, pedagogical technique, religion, morality, or spiritual quest. I’ve included these women, even if the legacy of sexism and racism means they did not consider themselves to be philosophical thinkers and/ or they were not given credit for their work in their day. Blow, Terrell, Yates, Goulette, Brackett, Bibb, Roqué, and Stewart fit into this category. 3) Analysis of social/political concerns, past or present. These women explored social/political matters and examined and/or theorized about them, thereby contributing to discussions in their own time or informing our understanding today. They sometimes contributed to establishing a new subdiscipline as they did so, such as feminism and critical race theory. Terrell, Yates, Goulette, Johnson, Addams, Ames Mead, Wells-Barnett, and Capetillo meet this criterion. There is some overlap in each of the aforementioned categories, of course. And as those of us who have unearthed and studied the work of women in philosophy know, scores of women were writing and discussing issues philosophically in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some readers might argue that other women should have been included in this volume. I carefully considered a range of women whose work intersected with the original early idealists, but

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determined that they could more effectively be addressed by other researchers or they could remain in queue for the time being. Some of these women have been recognized; others certainly deserve attention: Catharine Beecher, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Gertrude Bonin, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Lydia Cabrera, Ednah Dow Cheney, Sarah Early, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Angelina Grimke, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Sarah Grimke, Frances Watkins Harper, Julia Ward Howe, Laura Kellogg, Lucy Moten, Judith Sargent Murray, Sara Ramirez, Sarah Remond, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Katherine Davis Tillman, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Frances Wright. This book is not a comprehensive survey of all the nineteenth-century women thinkers in North America who qualify as philosophers, and making choices about whom to include and whom to set aside was extremely difficult. I can only clarify that my goal was to discuss women who participated in the early reception of German idealism in North America and contributed to its adaptation and development. The group of women discussed here (a) studied Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, or thinkers they influenced, like Froebel and Rosenkranz; (b) worked to “transplant” the German idealist tradition on the North American continent—especially as related to education and social/ political issues; or (c) built on the work of their colleagues who first studied and “transplanted” idealism in North America.

Historical Context In the nineteenth century, relatively speaking, a world of opportunities opened up for women in North America. But these opportunities emerged out of a specific set of social and political realities—some of which were designed to exclude women, others of which were considered women’s special domain. Education was one of the main avenues through which intellectually minded women established a professional identity, developed an area of expertise, and entered into philosophical discourse. Religion/spirituality was another

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area in which women established an authoritative voice and were able to claim at least some space, if not fully to declare it their domain. Women also entered into discussions of social and political issues, some of which were internal conversations: women’s role and rights, for instance, social reform, altruism, pacifism, cultural inclusion, and social justice. Finally, gender and gender-as-racialized was an area of discussion among women: women’s central role in the family, mothers as “the child’s first teacher,” the experience of gender in and through culture. These ideas were central to inquiries about the nature of gender, and, obviously, they were closely linked to other areas of women’s intellectual domain—pedagogy and social/political discourse in particular. Although women claimed realms of intellectual and cultural life as their own domain, they were acting within a larger social/political context, which was largely structured with a masculine and Eurocentric bias. The paragraphs that follow will ensure we keep the structures of the larger society in mind while exploring the ideas of women philosophical thinkers across races and cultures. Political and social life in North America in the first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by a set of interrelated struggles: Political and cultural elites of European descent in Canada, the United States, and Mexico were working to assert their independence from their parent nations. At the same time, they were engaging in territorial rivalries with each other while also doing their best to assert dominance over people with indigenous or African heritage who lived within their borders. The United States had firmly established its political and economic autonomy in its war with England during 1812–15. Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. While staying loyal to the crown, Canada took a step toward independence with its unique system of “responsible government”—an agreement with England to operate semiautonomously in 1848. And in that span of time, the United States engaged in conflicts with both of its neighbors. Between the United States and Canada, these were

INTRODUCTION  13

relatively minor disputes over territory along the Maine/New Brunswick and New Hampshire/Quebec borders in which no shots were fired. With Mexico, on the other hand, the United States launched an all-out war, and at the end Mexico had lost roughly one-third of its territory—what is now known as the American Southwest. Unfortunately, during this time, indigenous peoples in all three countries were subject to an array of injustices as European culture encroached on their territories, restricted their rights, and/or forcibly removed them from their homelands. And while slavery had been outlawed in Mexico (1829) and Canada (1834), it continued to thrive in the United States until the Civil War in the 1860s. In fact, it was just after the US Civil War that all three nations had new life breathed into them. By 1867, Mexico had a new constitution, Canada had its first constitution, and the United States was in the process of introducing the Reconstruction amendments to its constitution with the aim of repairing the damage done by slavery. Social reform and educational developments flourished in all three countries at this time. The women in this study were affected by these social and political changes and in some cases lived in the midst of them. Of course, women, in each nation and of all cultures within those nations, were rarely among the political elite—at least not at the level of policy making and governance. Even so, as big-picture social and political developments took place, across races and cultures women found a way to establish their identities and make their voices heard—sometimes as a maternal and nurturing force in society, sometimes as progressive educators and reformers, other times as troublemakers and rabble-rousers. What the women in this volume have in common is fluency in the philosophical, educational, or social/political discourses that were taking place at the time. Each of them faced the challenges and roadblocks that were so commonly in the way for all women in this era. Yet they found advocates among men in their social worlds and/or established a network of support among women that facilitated their intellectual growth and career success.

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The Origins of Philosophical Idealism in North America One of the quickest ways to find women in philosophy is to go through the men. Several of the European-heritage women in this volume entered philosophical discourse through their association with William Torrey Harris, the man who is often considered the central figure of the philosophical idealist movement in the United States, and they benefited from his egalitarian views of (white) women. Harris enthusiastically encouraged and promoted the work of many of his colleagues—male or female. Discovering German idealist philosophy while a student at Yale, Harris became unhappy with the traditional curriculum and its focus on the ancient classics there and left the elite college. He went west to St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1850s, which at that time was a bustling metropolis, where he developed a network of like-minded colleagues and formed the St. Louis Philosophical Society. He made his living as a teacher and was quickly promoted to principal of the high school, then superintendent of the city’s public schools. Since he had a good deal of administrative ability, he was a leader in local and national academic and cultural organizations, including the National Education Association and the American Social Science Association. He capped off his successful career as US commissioner of education (1890–1906). Once declaring that his goal was to adapt German thought to the American context, or “to make Hegel talk English,” William Torrey Harris and his col­ leagues made it their mission to apply idealist philosophical concepts to social and political concerns—education in particular. Harris seems to have been a gregarious person, and partly with the help of his enthusiasm and promotional savvy, the St. Louis idealist movement spread to other parts of the country in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. White female educators in the public school system were welcomed into the movement by Harris and his fellow genderegalitarian white male colleagues, which helped several European-heritage women establish themselves intellectually and professionally. Unfortunately,

INTRODUCTION  15

Harris seems to have accepted the racist structures that dominated social and political life in his day, thus contributing to the immense and often-irreparable damage inflicted on cultural minorities. This is not a side issue, in my view. Recognizing and valuing diversity are core commitments that underlie this project. Too often philosophers have been content with saying, “Perhaps this thinker was [racist, sexist, (fill in the blank)], but overall his ideas have value.” Yet making allowances like this contributes to the development of philosophy along lines of bias and exclusion. Doing so also silences and alienates those who are outside the dominant culture. Therefore, in the paragraphs that follow, I discuss the failures of the man most often identified as the leader of the early idealist movement in the United States, and in doing so I recognize that the white women who joined the movement were often complicit in perpetuating racism themselves. In my first work on the women of the idealist philosophical movement, I said that Harris supported “equal education” for African Americans, a statement that was based on claims made by his white male followers in the decades following his death. However, additional research for this book has shown that Harris failed miserably on this front. It appears that he accepted the idea that education for African Americans could be “equal” while remaining profoundly and eternally “separate.” Although he supported the North during the Civil War and discussed the conflict as a Hegelian dialectical struggle between bondage and freedom, his commitment to advancing that freedom seems to have been merely intellectual. Sadly, there is little evidence that, as superintendent of the St. Louis public schools, Harris made significant efforts to provide adequate education for African American children before or after the Civil War. Instead, he seems to have meekly accepted the school board’s vote to provide only minimal funding for a high school, to let the American Missionary Society supply the majority of the funds needed, and to place the school in a busy urban district that was known to be less-than-safe. Even his biographer, Kurt Leidecker, who generally had nothing but praise for Harris, conceded, “It must be admitted that Harris’ treatment of Colored Schools in

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his extensive Annual Reports was most perfunctory and meagre.”9 Only after a strong coalition of African American leaders and parents demanded the city abide by state mandates to fully fund and support education for black as well as white children did the school board comply. Once schools for African American children were fully established in St. Louis, however, William Torrey Harris deserves credit for ensuring this city would provide high-quality education. He hired the best African American educators in the liberal arts and sciences, at the request of parents who wanted positive role models for their children. Talented graduates of Oberlin College and Howard University were among the first African American teachers in St. Louis.10 This led the St. Louis high school in particular to become known as one of the best centers for secondary education for African American students in the United States on the cusp of the twentieth century. When it was established, it was the only high school for African American youth west of the Mississippi River in the United States. Even so, it seems clear that Harris was more committed to accommodating the racist structures in place in the city than to dismantling them. In 1880, his was one of the signatures on a letter urging the Missouri state legislature not to desegregate the state’s public schools, because integration would alienate whites and disrupt the social fabric.11 The fact that Harris resigned as superintendent at the end of that academic year makes his betrayal of African American children and their families in St. Louis all the more lamentable. Harris had weathered many political storms during his tenure in the city. He had been called “the pope” of the school system; he had been mocked for having so many lofty and abstruse pedagogical theories; he and his liberal ethics had even been blamed for a teacher’s extramarital affair.12 Yet he couldn’t find it in himself to confront racism and stand for genuine educational equality? Especially with his resignation pending, it seems that Harris could have kept his name off the list of signatories as a departing act of defiance. Of course, William Torrey Harris was a man of his time and had his cultural “blind spots,” as we say. But others with comparable positions of power and

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status made stronger stands. As noted earlier, the Unitarian minister, William Greenleaf Eliot, and the attorney Taylor Blow bought the freedom of at least a few people held in slavery. Eliot even engaged in a standoff and facilitated a man’s escape. Harris certainly could have done more to combat racism in the St. Louis public schools. In the interest of fully correcting the record, it is important to note that Harris also fell short of embracing racial equality later in life. While living in Washington, D.C., he served informally as a philosophy teacher and mentor to Arthur Craig, a man of color who later studied architecture and engineering, becoming a teacher and vocational counselor.13 Yet, there is no evidence that Harris interacted with or supported the work of the intellectuals and activists who made up the dynamic community of African Americans in Washington at this time—not even fellow educators at Howard University or M Street/ Dunbar High School. Most damning of all is Harris’s booklet, “On Negro Education.” This text makes it clear that he had imbibed the racist attitudes that thrived in St. Louis while he was an educator in the city. The work is filled with all the false and demeaning stereotypes of African Americans that were current at the time—that they were unmotivated, childlike, and so on. Frankly, that worn-out racist narrative is too familiar to merit giving it space on the page. This son of New England, where decades earlier Theodore Parker and other abolitionists denounced the institution of slavery, had conducted research that consisted of interviews with “experts” in “Negro Education”— each and every one of whom were former Confederates; some of them held membership in emerging white supremacist groups. Few moral failures are as difficult for a white liberal feminist to take in after having applauded Harris as a champion of white women’s professional advancement—and trusting accounts of his commitment to “equal” education for all in the process. Let the previous paragraphs stand as a heartfelt and rather mournful correction of the record. As noted in later chapters, white women in the idealist philosophical movement did not prove to be more proactive proponents of racial equality.

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For the most part, each of them remained silent about race and cultural diversity. No doubt, they benefited from their white privilege and thus passively contributed to the continued advance of the power structures that were in place. Like Harris, they were people of their time, but their shortcomings cannot be overlooked. We can also recognize that the largely masculine white discourse that has been accepted as the “mainstream” of intellectual and social/political history is just one of many strains of thought. For far too long we have accepted intellectual segregation and a fractured social/political history. Let me be clear: I applaud the work of scholars who have unearthed the contributions of thinkers and activists outside the dominant (white, male) culture. Yet in this volume, I aim to connect the dots between women, their ideas, and their social/political influence—across race, culture, and socioeconomic class. In most cases, because educational and career opportunities were open to white women first, they preceded women of color in intellectual life. But this was not always so: Betsy Stockton, Maria Stewart, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary did their work as educators or activists decades earlier than most white women. Brief sketches of Stockton and Shadd Cary appear in this volume; Maria Stewart’s work is discussed in greater depth.

Women in This Volume As we turn to Chapter 2 we’ll explore the theories women developed in early childhood education. While Susan Blow laid the foundation for women to thrive in and claim domain in this field, a younger generation of women of color picked up her discussions and adapted them to the needs of their communities. Interpreting the ideas of the German romantic/idealist thinker, Froebel, Blow asserted that young children learn best through playtime activities. She also maintained that women’s maternal nature makes them

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the best teachers of young children. Finally, the purpose of education, in her view, was to draw out the best in children and facilitate the “unfolding” of their intellectual and moral selves. Here we see Blow developing epistemology, ontology, and moral theory in and through pedagogy. Women of color in Chapter 2—Mary Church Terrell, Josephine Silone Yates, and Emma Johnson Goulette—accepted many of Blow’s claims about the value and purpose of early childhood pedagogy. Yet each of these women expanded the discussion to address the lived experience and social conditions of children and families in their communities. Women in Mexico who also appear in this chapter came into the discussion of early childhood pedagogy at the turn of the twentieth century. They adopted a combination of ideas from Americanized versions of philosophical idealism but also traveled to Europe to investigate pedagogical theory as it had developed there. Chapter 3 looks at the other end of the learning continuum: secondary and higher education, especially for girls and women. And here we see that Anna Brackett and Grace Bibb, white women who were part of the idealist philosophical movement in St. Louis, were not the only “firsts” in normal school education for teacher training. Fanny Jackson Coppin was the first woman to head a normal school in the African American community. Yet the three women seem to have been influenced by many of the same intellectual forces and educational principles. Not surprisingly, Coppin had a better understanding of the impact of cultural difference on individuals and communities, as demonstrated by her reflections on a mission trip to Africa. Given the opportunities afforded them as white women, Brackett and Bibb published more work than Coppin. All three appear to have embraced the idealist understanding of education as a process of the unfolding of the self in and through the cognitive development of the individual. Ana Roqué encountered different influences in philosophy and pedagogy in Puerto Rico, although, like Brackett and Bibb, she was both an educator and a feminist. Roqué aligned her educational theories with those of Auguste Comte, whose ideas predominated in this era throughout Latin America. She shared the

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liberal feminist convictions of Brackett and Bibb, though her sense of women’s equality was informed by her experience as a woman under colonial rule. Chapter 4 discusses the work of women intellectuals whose ideas developed apart from educational theory. Margaret Mercer authored a book on ethics in which she articulated her understanding of epistemology, moral theory, ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. Her contemporary, Maria Stewart, employed what has been called the Black Jeremiad to decry the injustices to which African Americans were subjected prior to the Civil War. Pauline Johnson denounced race-biased stereotypes of Native American women. She also sought to explain Native American values and culture in an attempt to counteract the damage done by forced assimilation policies in Canada and the United States. Ellen Mitchell had been part of the idealist movement in St. Louis early in her career. Though she left the region in the late 1870s, she continued to explore German idealism, which she shared with audiences of women in salon discussions. Mitchell also addressed the sexist double standard for sexual morality in “A Plea for Fallen Women.” Chapter 5 explores the political theories that are embedded in the writings of the European-heritage thinkers, Lucia Ames Mead and Jane Addams; the African American political activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and the feminist and Puerto Rican labor rights activist, Luisa Capetillo. Lucia Ames Mead, is less well known than Jane Addams, but the two worked alongside each other as peace activists and theorists in the early decades of the twentieth century. Addams is now recognized as a pragmatist philosopher and is the only white woman in this volume known to have crossed the cultural divide to collaborate on projects with African American women. She is also well known for her pioneering work as a social reformer, a peace activist, and the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The pacifist theories that Ames Mead and Addams developed are discussed largely in tandem, since the two shared so many views in common. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a towering figure in African American social and political life, devoting the vast amount of her time and energies to a comprehensive and sustained campaign to denounce

INTRODUCTION  21

the vigilante attacks against African Americans in the United States known as lynching. Wells-Barnett also stepped across race and culture to work with white women who shared her commitments to women’s issues and racial justice. The philosophical elements of her campaign—a nascent feminist/ womanist theory, discussion of intersectionality, and an emerging critical race theory—are discussed in this chapter. Luisa Capetillo embraced socialism and feminism, often weaving the two together to develop a theory of substantive justice that included both economic and gender equality. The previous exclusion of these and other women from discussions of philosophy has necessarily contributed to the shape the canon has taken. Their points of emphasis, structure of arguments, and conclusions are distinctive and sometimes do not fit neatly into our current philosophical categories. The aim of this book is to help dismantle the masculine bias in philosophy by recovering the work of a specific group of women in North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and to do so by becoming more culturally inclusive. With any luck, I have succeeded and hope that this work opens new, diverse, and ongoing discussions of issues and ideas in philosophy in the future.

2 Pedagogy, Philosophy, and “Spiritual Motherhood” Susan Blow, Mary Church Terrell, Josephine Silone Yates, Emma Johnson Goulette

Introduction As noted in Chapter 1, pedagogy is a branch of philosophy that readily became women’s domain in the nineteenth century. This was especially true of theories of early childhood education. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the concept of gender complementarity, which had been in place for some time within Western culture at large and was strongly reinforced by philosophical traditions. Consider the gender dichotomies Aristotle posited, which held currency for centuries: male/female, active/passive, form/matter.1 Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm took his ideas seriously and introduced those ideas into both their philosophical discourse and their religious thought. Hegel drew on Aristotle’s ideas about gender in Philosophy of Right, endorsing these ancient dichotomies and adding that women are more subjective and emotional, and thus they are fully self-actualized in the home and more able to care for and nurture children than are men.2 This idea aligned well with

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traditional understandings of women and their role in society, of course. Ironically, it also opened doors to professional and intellectual life that had previously been closed to women. Throughout the nineteenth century, early childhood education attracted women who were comfortable with gender complementarity. In fact, many early childhood theorists fully embraced the view that gender difference is inherent and profound. Susan Elizabeth Blow, a white woman who was one of the best-known leaders in early childhood education in the United States and whose published works were used as textbooks for decades, was one of these women. Objecting to women’s participation in the “masculine” world of business and politics, Blow dedicated herself to the work of educating young children, embracing her chosen vocation as “spiritual motherhood.”3 There was a good deal of exchange between Susan Blow and white colleagues in Toronto, but she seemed unaware of the use of early childhood pedagogy by African American women educated at the Toronto Normal School. In the United States, Blow was followed by younger contemporaries, like Mary Church Terrell and Josephine Silone Yates, who brought early childhood theories and methods to their African American communities. Another younger contemporary, Emma Johnson Goulette, did the same in Native American communities. She aimed to promote Blow’s traditional kindergarten methods over the production-driven “industrial training” that was imposed on children in the “Indian boarding school” system throughout the United States. Among both African American and Native American women, early childhood education was often held up as an ideal way to serve as “mothers of the race” by nurturing children. In Mexico, early childhood education practice developed independently, with an early iteration in the 1820s, and a later and more long-lasting iteration led by women at the turn of the twentieth century. Although there were certainly variations in pedagogical theory and practice across different cultural groups and within specific communities, the educators in this chapter shared the view that women are especially well suited to teach young children. Yet they were not merely engaged in child’s play.



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In a world with few career options open to them, many intellectual women studied early childhood education in earnest, developing theories of learning, of childhood, of womanhood, and of social/political good as they refined their pedagogy. Few of them deigned to call themselves philosophers, but their thought ventured into philosophy—especially if we decenter the masculinist philosophical narrative that has dominated the discipline since it has confined itself to the halls of academia. Once a branch of philosophy, in the nineteenth century pedagogical theory became a realm within which women could discuss philosophical questions. And this they did while developing expertise in what quickly became a feminine domain of inquiry. Susan Elizabeth Blow (1843–1916) was considered an authority in early childhood education in North America well into the twentieth century. She was well educated by the standards of the day, and her writings were theoretically focused. Her books went through multiple printings and were read by thousands of women devoted to her pedagogical theories. In this sense, her work served as philosophy for women by a woman at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a specialist in early childhood education, Blow was familiar with the ideas of Johann Pestalozzi, but she narrowed in on the thought of Friedrich Froebel, remaining a Froebelian purist throughout her career. Volumes have been written about these two early childhood pioneers, but I will provide just a brief sketch here. Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1827) was a Swiss educator who embraced Rousseau’s discourse on education in Emile. He asserted that teachers should allow children’s natural curiosity to guide their explorations of everyday experience, nature in particular. He also asserted that childreadiness dictates what children are equipped to learn at each stage of growth. His theories first appeared in North America in the 1820s. Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) was influenced by Hegel as well as Rousseau. He agreed with Pestalozzi’s child-centered pedagogy but saw ways to improve upon it. For the purposes of this discussion, his main innovation was his insight that children learn through playtime. He devised a series of steps through which to use toys,

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creative activities, and imaginative play to engage children in the learning process. Froebel’s ideas were introduced in North America in the 1850s. Both thinkers idealized childhood and put great emphasis on the role of mothers in nurturing children. Their child-centered pedagogical theories have largely been subsumed into educational practice in the West today.

Who Was “the Mother of the Kindergarten”? Before proceeding further, it is important to note that, although she was long referred to as the “Mother of the Kindergarten” in the United States, Susan Blow earned this title as a proponent of a specific set of methods devised by Friedrich Froebel. Blow was the first educator within this tradition in the English-speaking United States to successfully establish an ongoing early childhood education program in a public school system. However, these methods, now familiarly referred to by the German name “kindergarten”— “children’s garden”—were first introduced within a German-speaking community in Wisconsin by Margarethe Schurz, wife of the future politician Carl Schurz.4 A number of women in North America who preceded, followed, or worked independently from Blow as pioneers in early childhood educators also deserve mention. Marie Duclos Fretageout (1783–1833) has received little recognition for her work as an educator, but was one of the first practitioners to bring Pestalozzian pedagogy to the United States—first in Philadelphia (1820), then at the wellknown utopian community, New Harmony in Indiana (1826).5 William MacLure (1763–1840), a Scottish émigré, is usually given credit for introducing Pestalozzi’s methods to North America. He did in fact hire both Fretageout and Joseph Neef (1770–1854) to help him bring early childhood education to his adopted country. But as an educator trained in Europe, Fretageout was responsible for teaching, for teacher training, and for day-to-day operations at the schools she helped MacLure establish. Much of his time—perhaps the majority of it—was spent traveling to promote his theories. Fretageout and



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MacLure were enthusiastic about bringing kindergarten to postrevolutionary Mexico and had some success. In a trip to that country in 1828–29, he won the favor of Mexican journalists and political leaders, who supported his proposal to transport a cohort of indigenous orphans to New Harmony to be educated, presumably in order to return and contribute to future educational efforts in their home country.6 In the end, MacLure was permitted to take only two indigenous Mexican boys back to his utopian community. The sense of entitlement that he and Fretageout shared and the cultural bias that informed it is painfully evident to readers today. Madame Fretageout was said to have expressed delight in seeing “the brown little creatures” arrive at New Harmony.7 On a return trip to Mexico, Fretageout accompanied MacLure but succumbed to illness, dying there in 1833. The first women on record to have embraced early childhood pedagogy in Canada taught at a Methodist missionary school on Grape Island in Ottawa, established by the minister and educator William Case in 1826: Hester Hubbard, Eliza Barnes, and Betsy Stockton.8 Accounts indicate that Case, Hubbard, and Barnes relied on English education manuals produced by Samuel Wilderspin and Mary Howland.9 In 1829, however, Betsey Stockton, a woman of African descent, was “employed to introduce the Pestalozzian system of instruction.”10 Stockton had teaching experience as a missionary in Maui and had also been recruited to open the first “infant school” for African American families in Philadelphia prior to joining the staff at Grape Island.11 As was true throughout the nineteenth century in North America, expertise in pedagogy gave these women a great deal of influence and authority. Eliza Barnes, a Europeanheritage woman, added credentials as a missionary to that authority and was reported to have delivered a fiery sermon on occasion. Although Betsey Stockton taught at Grape Island for only a short time, when she returned to her home in Princeton, New Jersey, she grew to prominence as a leader in both education and religion within the African American community.12 Elizabeth Peabody has been recognized as the first educator in the United States to put a Froebelian kindergarten into place in a public school system—in

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Boston, Massachusetts, in 1859–60. Peabody, a white woman, was a central figure in the New England Transcendentalist movement and discovered Froebel’s methods and theories during an encounter with Margarethe Schurz during the latter’s visit to Boston. Although the Boston school board did not vote to provide ongoing support to the program, the experiment inspired William Torrey Harris to introduce early childhood education in St. Louis just over a decade later. Peabody has received a good deal of attention in recent years for her work as a thinker and activist. In contrast to many Europeanheritage educators in her era, she held strong convictions about the right of all children to education and supported both Native American and African American schools during the course of her long career.13 In the early 1860s, Pestalozzi-inspired “object lessons” were fully in place on the Canadian-US border, at the Toronto Normal School and the newly founded Primary Teachers’ Training School in Oswego, New York. Susan Blow’s white friend and colleague, Ada Marean Hughes was a central figure in early childhood education in Toronto, first as a proponent of Pestalozzi’s system, then as a convert to Froebelian methods. The Toronto Normal School admitted students without regard to race. So a number of women of African descent in the United States crossed the border to escape oppression as well as to earn an education in pedagogy. Emmeline Shadd was one of these early childhood educators. A member of a community of writers, educators, and activists, she was born into a free black family in Delaware. Her parents, Abraham and Harriet Shadd, chose to emigrate to Canada prior to the Civil War rather than live under repressive conditions in the United States. The family settled in Ontario, living and working between Windsor, just across the river from Detroit and Chatham, fifty miles (eighty kilometers) east. Emmeline attended the Toronto Normal School, earning top honors when she graduated in 1855. She taught at the Elgin Settlement in Buxton, Ontario, and went to the South in the United States to teach after the nation’s civil war before returning to Ontario.14 Fannie Richards (1840–1920) had ties to the Shadd family through marriage and was said to have attended the Toronto Normal School in the late 1850s.15



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By 1863, she was teaching in segregated schools in Detroit until the landmark Workman school desegregation case in 1870.16 She is the first on record to have taught kindergarten classes in Detroit, between 1872 and 1874. So she may have introduced early childhood education into a public school system before Susan Blow did so in St. Louis in 1873. Like Elizabeth Peabody in Boston, Richards did not get ongoing support for this innovation, however, because the city did not fund a kindergarten program until 1885. Some historians have assumed Richards was trained in kindergarten theory by Susan Blow. Yet the two women likely discovered and developed their early childhood education programs independently: Blow traveled to New York to study the theories and methods of Friedrich Froebel. Richards is likely to have studied Pestalozzian theories and methods in Toronto. Richards may have been among the hundreds of women who attended the teacher training program Blow introduced in St. Louis in 1877, but she is likely to have done so primarily to gain credentials and the Detroit school board’s endorsement, rather than out of a need to be educated by her peer. Like Maria Baldwin in Boston, Richards was one of very few women of African descent to teach in integrated schools in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Haydee Campbell (1865–1921) attended Oberlin College and was one of two African American teachers Susan Blow trained in St. Louis in 1882—the year the St. Louis school board finally responded to demands for kindergarten education in the city’s “colored” schools.17 In 1889–90, she began serving as the director of both the kindergarten and the teacher training program for the African American community in St. Louis and would remain in this position until her retirement in 1918. Racism would prevent her from being promoted to supervisor of all kindergartens in the St. Louis system, despite her high levels of achievement. Campbell was chair of the kindergarten committee of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and one of the plenary speakers at its annual convention in Chicago in 1899.18 1897, she and her colleague Helene Abbott were featured presenters at the centennial celebration of the city of Nashville. In 1903, she served as director of the kindergarten

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training program at the Tuskegee Summer School for Teachers. In 1907 she led a roundtable session with Sylvania Williams, principal of New Orleans City School, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Negro Teachers. Campbell received national recognition for her work—in African American publications, in the popular (white) women’s magazine, Godey’s Book, and in education periodicals edited by whites. We visited thoroughly two of the schools entirely attended by colored children . . . with principals, teachers, and kindergartners all of the same race. . . . The only married woman retained in the service of the St Louis School Committee is a colored kindergartner [Haydee Campbell] whose innate power and grace could not easily be replaced.19 The first women to study and implement early childhood theories in Mexico were trained by European immigrants in the 1870s and 1880s. Enrique Laubscher (1837–90), a Bavarian who immigrated to Mexico in 1872, was the first to translate Froebel’s work into Spanish. He opened Mexico’s first kindergarten in Alvarado, Veracruz, in 1881, which was followed two years later by a model school in Orizaba, also in the state of Veracruz. Enrique Rébsamen (1857–1904) was a Swiss immigrant who joined Laubscher’s efforts in Mexico in 1885, teaching in the model school in Orizaba. He then helped establish a normal school for teacher training in Xalapa, north of Veracruz before founding schools of his own—in Oaxaca in Mexico’s southwest/central region, in Guanajuato in central Mexico, and in Jalisco on the West Coast. By the 1890s, women in Mexico were involved in the movement to educate young children. Laura Mendez de Cuenca, Estefania Castaneda, and the sisters, Rosaura and Elena Zapata studied the theories of both Pestalozzi and Froebel and traveled to the United States and Europe to observe early childhood methods in action. They were directed to modernize existing kindergartens and establish new schools and teacher training programs upon their return. Mendez de Cuenca spent a considerable amount of time in San Francisco in the mid-1890s. After the turn of the century, she was sent by Mexican officials



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to St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States and Berlin, Germany, to report on pedagogical practices in each city. Her notes and letters would provide an opportunity for comparative study of US, German, and Mexican educational systems in this period.20 Sources indicate that the Mexican government sent Estefania Castaneda and the Zapata sisters to study kindergartens in San Francisco, New York, and Boston in 1902. When they returned, they opened new kindergartens and teacher training colleges in Mexico City.21 Little material by or about these women has been translated into English. More research is needed to determine whether they established ties with the US and Canadian women discussed in this volume. It is important to note that at the turn of the century in the United States, educators were more interested in exporting early childhood theories to Asia than in educating Asian American children at home. Religious organizations used two strategies to promote early childhood education outside the Western world. Frequently, they established missionary schools abroad, such as the Methodist-established McTyeire School in Shanghai, sending well-trained educators to teach kindergarten theories and methods to local women. It also became common to sponsor women from Asia to study early childhood pedagogy in the United States, most of whom were the daughters of the upper classes in China and/or recent converts to Christianity. F. Y. Tsao was one of the women trained in the West who imported early childhood education to her homeland. She graduated from McTyeire in Shanghai, studied at Cottey College in Missouri in 1897, and continued on to graduate study at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. Tsao then returned to China to serve as head of the Preparatory Department at McTyeire. She wrote for Western missionary and education periodicals, promoting education for women and girls and providing updates on the career paths of her peers from China.22 Julia Yen followed Tsao at McTyeire, graduating in 1900. She then attended Virginia Female Institute (now Stuart Hall School), where she earned a degree in music in 1904.23 Ilien Tang graduated from Central Wesleyan College in Missouri in 1906 and was favorably compared

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to Susan Blow: “What Miss Blow translated from Froebel into English, Miss Tang is daily translating and giving to her pupils in Mandarin.”24 She published a book of songs for young children and by 1910 had established both a kindergarten and a “normal department” for teacher training in Nanchang, 500 miles (800 kilometers) southwest of Shanghai. M. T. Chang graduated from New York Normal College (now Hunter) before teaching in England, then at the London Mission School in Shanghai.25 Finally, Ruby Sia graduated from Cornell College in Iowa and undertook graduate study at Baltimore Women’s College (now Goucher). Like most of the women from China who studied in the West in this era, Sia returned to China, teaching in Fuzhou, a coastal city about 500 miles (800 kilometers) south of Shanghai. Sia was among the women who contributed to discussions of education at all levels in China, and spoke in favor of “raising up a trained leadership for the Chinese people” by educating women. “The outlook for China’s future enlightenment depends on the opportunity given her women,” she said. “It is of great importance that the ‘captive daughters’ of the ‘Flowering Kingdom’ should be freed and enlightened through the instrumentality of higher learning.”26 Ironically, two Chinese American children had been turned away from the newly established public school kindergarten in San Francisco in 1885. Their parents protested and took the case to court.27 Rather than allow these children to enter school the following year, however, the city of San Francisco opened a new kindergarten classroom for Chinese-heritage students, of whom there were now six. Their instructor, Rose Thayer, was a white woman who had served as a missionary and later lived in the Balkans to work as a nurse prior to the First World War. When a reporter came to examine and report on the school, Thayer was protective and sought to shield the children rather than risk making them a showpiece in the morning papers. The children were there to learn, she told the reporter, not to be treated like a museum display.28 To date, no evidence has surfaced to show that education advocates in any other cultural group spoke up on behalf of these young victims of discrimination— even though there was a thriving community of kindergarten theorists in



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San Francisco. As noted earlier, white women in religious networks spent untold sums of money and expended immense amounts of time and energy to train teachers to take kindergarten education to other cultures. Meanwhile local minority, immigrant, and working poor communities were neglected or maligned.

Susan Elizabeth Blow While it is clear that there were many “mothers of the kindergarten” in North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is impossible to deny that Susan Blow (1843–1916) was a central figure in the theory and practice of early childhood education for decades. Given her social/historical placement as a white woman of privilege, which provided her with a degree of access to elite social and intellectual circles, this will not surprise today’s readers. At the same time, it is important to recognize that all women in this era were subject to degrees of disadvantage, if not oppression. The daughter of a Missouri politician and international diplomat, Susan Blow was prohibited from pursuing a career until she was close to thirty years old and had “failed” to marry. She was considered a bit too “bookish,” as “displaying quite too much erudition” for a woman in her upper-class social circles.29 Yet she suffered from either a false sense of feminine humility or what today is called “imposter syndrome”—or perhaps both—repeatedly expressing a sense of inadequacy and a lack of intellectual worth. If not for the constant support and urging of friends and colleagues, like William Torrey Harris, it is unlikely she would ever have committed her ideas to print. In fact, her first book was published only after Harris arranged for an editor to review and approve of the project behind the scenes. As one biographical sketch put it, Blow succeeded professionally “more or less in spite of ” her wealth and privilege.30 Who was this woman who laid the theoretical foundations of early childhood educational theory and paved the way for the many women who followed, and what were her contributions to philosophy?

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Susan Blow was a member of the St. Louis philosophical circle, a movement initiated by young intellectuals, educators, and activists in the 1860s who were enamored with German idealist thought. Recognized as one of the major figures in this movement, she has received more attention from historians than any of her female colleagues.31 She wrote a number of articles and books, the most significant of which are Symbolic Education, Mottoes and Commentaries of Friedrich Froebel’s “Mother Play,” Letters to Mothers on the Philosophy of Froebel, “Kindergarten Education,” and Educational Issues in the Kindergarten. Although Blow focused on early childhood pedagogical theory, she was more than “just an educator.” The titles of Susan Blow’s articles and books do nothing to reveal the epistemology, ontology, moral theory, social philosophy, and metaphysics embedded in her pedagogical theory, but she was well versed in philosophy. As a central figure in the St. Louis philosophical movement in Missouri, she focused primarily on German idealism. But her publications and correspondence make it clear that she studied a range of male thinkers in the history of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. She was also familiar with the work of influential nineteenth-century figures, both male and female: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Martineau, Henry George, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Herbert Spencer, Sojourner Truth, William Torrey Harris, Edward Caird, George Sylvester Morris, Thomas Davidson, George Holmes Howison, Nicholas Murray Butler, William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey. In Blow’s view, early childhood education was first and foremost philosophical. She objected to pedagogy that departed from the methods of Froebel and was especially troubled by educational theories that relied on psychological observations of children, charging that they were mechanistic. She believed that too great a reliance on sense data is detrimental to children and once comically voiced her disapproval of an overzealous researcher who sought to test children’s senses. Reportedly, he developed a list of forty-six



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foods that a kindergarten child should be able to identify by taste or smell, asserting this was a valuable indicator of learning. But in Blow’s view the exercise did little more than “assail the nostrils of infancy with a bewildering variety of perfumes and stenches.”32 While less theoretically focused, several of the white contemporaries with whom Blow interacted agreed with her adherence to Froebel’s pedagogy— among them: her mentors, Maria Kraus Boelte and William Torrey Harris; her friends, Laura Fisher and Ada Marean Hughes; her sometimes-rivals, Alice Putnam, Lucy Wheelock, Elizabeth Harrison, Patty Smith Hill, and William and Eudora Hailmann; and her disciples, Mary C. McCulloch, Caroline M. C. Hart, and Mabel Wilson.33 They were succeeded by progressives who endorsed Froebelian child-centered ideals but also accepted social science– based theories that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s. Although these younger women were greatly influenced by the theories that Blow articulated so well, new methods informed by developments in child psychology made many of her epistemological claims seem outdated.34 The next generation of educators, women of color among them, were also striving to address new demographic needs and cultural concerns, so they adapted Froebelian theories to their own social/political context.

Josephine Silone Yates Josephine Silone Yates (1852–1912) was born in Mattituck, New York, the youngest daughter of Alexander and Parthenia (Reeve) Silone.35 She lived with extended family in Philadelphia while attending the Institute of Colored Youth, where Fannie Jackson Coppin (discussed in Chapter 3) had recently become principal. Following in Coppin’s footsteps, she attended high school in Newport, Rhode Island, then earned a teaching certificate at Rhode Island State Normal School, before earning a master’s degree at National University in Illinois in 1904.36 She excelled in the sciences and accepted a teaching position at the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri, where she met

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her husband, W. W. Yates, a science teacher himself and principal of Wendell Phillips School in Kansas City. Yates was a strong voice for racial equality and an active member of the NACW, serving as its treasurer (1897–1901), then its president (1901–05). As a woman who crossed the barriers that were in place between African American and European-heritage educators during her lifetime, Yates was recognized as a leader with “culture and broad intelligence [who believes] that women can show themselves as a strong factor in bringing about a better understanding between the races, especially thru the work accomplished by women’s clubs.”37

Mary Church Terrell Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) was a member of one of the wealthiest African American families in the United States, headed by Robert and Louisa (Ayres) Church, in Memphis, Tennessee.38 She attended Antioch College in Ohio before entering Oberlin, where she earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. She also spent a good deal of time in Europe as a young adult and may have encountered German pedagogical theories there independently. When she returned to the United States, she held teaching positions at Wilberforce College (now a university) in Ohio and the well-regarded M Street School in Washington, D.C. As an educator, she became a central figure in a thriving community of African American intellectuals in Washington, and met her husband, Robert Heberton Terrell, there. She became well acquainted with other women in leadership in the nation’s capital, among them Anna Julia Cooper (discussed in volume two). Church Terrell was among the founders of the Colored Women’s League in Washington as well as the NACW, serving as its first president. Like Yates, Terrell met success in crossing “the color line” that was so firmly in place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She spoke at conferences sponsored by white women and was influential in women’s peace activism, traveling to Switzerland to give a keynote address at the International Committee of Women for a Permanent Peace in 1919.



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Education was among Terrell’s many interests, and she became a strong proponent of early childhood programs, for both the individual development of each child and the betterment of society.

Emma Johnson Goulette Emma Johnson Goulette (1876–1960) was given the name Ducquawas by her European-heritage father, Jacob Johnson, and Potawatomi mother, Sophia Vieux, and was born in Salt Creek, Oklahoma. She attended a number of educational institutions as a youth, among them the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, and the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. After teaching at the Model School of the Institute for Colored Youth, she accepted a position in the Philadelphia public schools, where she taught for a year. Unlike many women in her era, she continued to teach after she was married—to Jefferson Davis Goulette, an architect with a mix of Scottish and Sioux heritage. She held positions at government-run tribal schools from 1897 until 1910: Quapaw School and Seneca Indian School, both in Oklahoma; Rice Station and Pima Indian School, both in Arizona; and Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico. Between teaching assignments, Goulette worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1911, she was among the founders of the Society of American Indians (SAI), along with another woman educator who taught in tribal schools, Angel De Cora, a Winnebago artist. As the first Native American woman known to have been trained in kindergarten pedagogy,39 Goulette shared her expertise with both her peers and her disciples throughout her career. Her contributions to Native American education were recognized among her contemporaries, and she served on SAI’s committee on education for many years. Josephine Silone Yates embraced Froebelian pedagogy but believed it could work in tandem with new theories and methods provided by child psychology. Others, like Mary Church Terrell and Emma Johnson Goulette, emphasized

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the social and political value of early childhood education for bringing culture and opportunity to their communities. Yates, Terrell, and Goulette recognized the damaging effects of racism on children’s moral development. Each of these women had a strong historical and theoretical foundation in early childhood pedagogy and insisted that effective teacher training was essential to meet the needs and interests of their communities. They were acutely aware of the role they played as educators and women of color urging for equality and cultural uplift. After a discussion of the theories Blow articulated—which influenced early childhood education theory for decades—the chapter will turn to this later generation of thinkers, who were just beginning their work as education advocates when Blow started publishing her ideas in the 1890s.

Philosophy in/and Pedagogy: Epistemology, Ontology, and Moral Agency For Susan Blow, pedagogy and philosophy were in a constant dialogue. She viewed pedagogy through a philosophical lens and philosophy through a pedagogical lens. She opened her first theoretical work, Symbolic Education, with a chapter on atomism, and closed her last book, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, with a substantial discussion of naturalism, pragmatism, and philosophical idealism. As one of the most authoritative voices in early childhood pedagogy in the decades just before and after the turn of the twentieth century, she influenced thousands of educators, most of them women. In this sense, she laid the theoretical foundation upon which so many other women built their own pedagogy and/or philosophy. Her ideas also stand on their own as philosophy proper. Susan Blow was familiar with Hume’s empiricism as well as both the Kantian and Hegelian brands of idealism, but Hegel was the philosopher whose ideas she found the most convincing. Applying his philosophy to education, she saw the process of learning as an unfolding (Entfaltung) of the self and proceeded from here to a discussion of mind, consciousness, self-consciousness, and



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moral agency.40 Aligning herself with Hegel’s thought, she envisioned knowledge acquisition as a dynamic process in which the mind encounters and interacts with its object of thought, first building a cache of knowledge, then establishing consciousness, moving then to an assertion of self-consciousness, and finally developing self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) so as to become a moral agent. Embracing a German idealist epistemology, she begins with the empirical sense data we encounter day to day. As the mind encounters that sense data, it immediately engages with it. In a dynamic and unmediated process, the mind perceives the characteristics of the sense data and recognizes it as a particular entity while also recognizing its general, universal properties. Mind’s next step is to develop an understanding of the entity in relationship to other entities and processes in the world. This information is quickly transposed into the material of thought that is both the content of the mind and the mind’s unique activity, thus enriching the mind and expanding its cognitive abilities. The next link in the chain of knowledge acquisition—in logical, not necessarily temporal priority—is the mind’s awareness of sense data as an entity distinct from itself. This is the moment at which the differentiation between subject and object comes into play. At this point, mind becomes aware of its own processes of thought (consciousness) and its unique identity as an individual (self-consciousness). In Blow’s system, knowledge acquisition is an unmediated and creative process that involves the whole person—experience, intellect, and will. As such it involves self-initiated activity and is at root also a self-creative process. Applying her theory directly to early childhood pedagogy, she sees the presence of a self-creative dimension of human intellect in children as well as adults. Because the mind is by nature an active entity, it does not passively receive data but seizes it and internalizes it as knowledge. As an early childhood educator, Blow encouraged teachers to present this data effectively by using systematic pedagogical methods to properly facilitate the development of a child’s mind. It is at this point that Blow makes a seamless transition from epistemology to personal ontology (if not quite a philosophy of mind). In her view, the

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development of consciousness makes individuals aware of their powers of thought and allows them to engage in cognitive processes. The development of self-consciousness leads to an awareness of the self as a subject with its own needs, interests, and aims. This awareness leads to moral agency. Yet, in an idealist framework, self-consciousness also leads individuals to recognize their own contingent nature, to face their finitude, their negation in the face of the infinite. This sense of negation leads individuals to want to escape finitude and seek the transcendent, the infinite. According to Blow, this involves a process of selfestrangement and return, discussed later. Operating with these epistemological and ontological assumptions, Blow developed a theory in which education— even at the very earliest stages of a child’s life—facilitates the process of cognitive development and knowledge acquisition. But she didn’t stop there, because in her view the ultimate purpose of education is to establish capable moral agents. Woven throughout Blow’s theory is the term “self-activity”—Selbsttätigkeit, a term used by both Froebel and Hegel. Blow translated this term literally, and younger contemporaries, among them Mary Church Terrell and Josephine Silone Yates, followed her lead. Yates appropriated the term within her own theory, identifying it with “thought-power,” a term she used to denote the selfcontrol, attentiveness, and judgment that children develop when educated effectively. Yates then used the concept of self-activity as a bridge to concepts employed to promote vocational training for youth.41 Blow uses “self-activity” as an umbrella term to describe any form of agency related to education. But there are actually two types of self-activity in her system: intellectual will and moral will. Self-activity as intellectual will relates to the mind’s ability and desire to “possess” its own knowledge and build on it. An individual with this type of self-activity will develop both greater powers of cognition and an ability to master abstract, conceptual thinking. Self-activity as moral will starts with the development of self-discipline. It then leads to the awareness of an ability to make moral choices, and then to the decision to make moral choices. Ideally, of course, these moral choices will be responsible and aimed toward social good.



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Education, Self-Transcendence, and Culture In Blow’s view, good moral choices sometimes call for us to engage in selfnegation in an attempt to transcend our mundane, temporal reality. This is possible through undergoing a process of estrangement from oneself in a particular experience and context, followed by a return to the self—ideally with a renewed and transformative understanding of that self. Blow dedicates most of her discussion of self-estrangement and return to the role education plays in facilitating this process. But at points she extends her theory to discuss religious belief, which can serve as an avenue for self-annihilation in other forms. In her view Eastern religions strive to surrender the self to the One, for instance. Lacking a deep understanding of Eastern traditions and fully accepting Hegel’s archaic rendition of history and thus his bias against “Oriental” thought, however, Blow dismissed these traditions. She embraced Christianity, which she believed fully embodies the process of self-annihilation and return through its story of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection.42 In Blow’s pedagogical theory, individuals by nature are prone to creative selfactivity, but their awareness of finitude is integrally tied to the process of selfestrangement and return—even for very young children. In her view, effective pedagogy engages students in venturing beyond their everyday understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit. Very young children’s self-estrangement is facilitated by playful imaginings; that of their somewhat older peers by exposure to fairy tales; youth by acquaintance with classic literature. In the positive sense, young children enter a game or make-believe time, which allows them to venture far beyond their usual paths through the magic of learning. In the negative sense, by engaging in new learning experiences, children negate their finite selves and develop a new (spiritual) self in and through playtime. Through making conquests along with their heroes, for instance, they also conquer the wickedness within. In Blow’s terms: “It is by slaying caprice that [a student] attains rational will, by renouncing opinion that [he or she] gains truth, by crucifying selfishness that [he or she] conquers selfhood.”43

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Yet what positive role can self-annihilation play? Certainly learning about other personalities, cultures, places, and times can do no harm. Even metaphorically killing the demons within makes sense from a psychological point of view. Unless we keep in mind Blow’s overall idealist project, all this talk of self-annihilation reads as gibberish. Of course, the answer to the question from her point of view is this: Self-annihilation—Hegel’s notion of negation— must be supplemented by return to the self in order for the dialectical process to be complete. The young child begins with an original self, transcends that self by “trying on” a new self through imagination in play, then returns to the original self. In and through this experience, the child develops a new perspective on the nature of this “original” self. The youth or adult can also enter into a process of estrangement and return in which they too are transformed. In an individual’s relation to the natural world or social order, Blow maintains that by “wandering away from himself into . . . seemingly foreign realms, the individual for the first time finds himself at home.”44 Moving further into a theory of personal ontology, she describes the process in this way: Mind reveals itself as a process of estrangement and return, a self-diremption into specific ideas and energies, and a return into itself by the reintegration of its dirempted elements into the unity of consciousness.45 The fact that all of these phases of individual development grow out of the self-active nature of learning is significant, because it necessarily ushers in a consideration of self-consciousness and thus of intentionality within the subject. After all, while it is natural for the mind to undergo a synthesis of the self, it is by no means automatic. The very purpose of education is for the self to determine its own course of action. Within Blow’s theory, this means that in every individual, the will and the intellect are intimately linked. The act of learning is an act to direct the mind and thus is an act of the will. Educators must aim to stimulate both intellect and will concurrently so students can reflect on the information at hand and will themselves to integrate it into their intellectual lives. These are not two separate acts, but one act with two phases.



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With very young children, this is done primarily by using playtime and games, which stimulate both cognitive and moral development. As children grow, both intellect and will can be instructed more directly. Further, the process of self-realization through education is an ongoing, not a one-time, event. The self creates and re-creates itself while both will and intellect assimilate new information and pursue higher levels of knowledge. This is why Blow and her colleagues adhered to an educational hierarchy; at different stages of life not only different material but also more challenging methods of instruction are necessary. And both enable the pupil to gather a larger and more complex body of knowledge and thus to assimilate more information. This will become clearer in the next chapter regarding secondary education and teacher training, but it is true for Blow as well. Furthermore, while the process of developing self-consciousness takes place within the individual, this is not to say it is a wholly subjective process: Self-consciousness is the knowing of the self by the self, and this implies both the distinction of subject and object and the recognition of their identity. The life of the spirit is therefore an endless process of self-diremption and of reintegration of its dirempted elements into the synthetic unity of consciousness. Its history is an endless flight from itself in order to find itself.46 Since Blow also claims that self-consciousness is “the form of spirit” and “spirit makes the world,”47 it is clear that each individual is participating in a metaphysical process when he or she engages in the act of self-making and thereby becomes a self-conscious being. Therefore, the individual human spirit shares with God in bringing about the “unity of consciousness” of which Blow speaks. Individual self-consciousness as derived from universal selfconsciousness, then, is part of the world-making consciousness. Blow maintained that through education the child “ascends from the world of Nature to the world of humanity; from the world of things to the world of self-activity.”48 Educational exercises cannot consist of simply an arbitrary grouping of activities but instead must be a logical series of steps intended

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for the instruction of children. This is because traditional games, stories, and myths are the “deposit of unconscious reason,” which can be put to use in an educational context. The educator must preserve what is good and excise what is “crude and coarse in these products of instinct.”49 Aligned as she was with idealist understandings of education and culture (Bildung), Blow saw education as the means of transmitting a cumulative record of the wisdom of the ages. Education helps children explore society’s “wider life.”50 Teachers are free to update or adapt learning activities to keep them relevant to children’s experience, but they must maintain the spirit of her idealist pedagogical system—that is, they must focus on children’s cognitive and moral development, their “unfolding” (Entfaltung).51

From Moral Agency to Moral Training, From Culture to Inculcation Perhaps there has never been a time when educational theory and practice did not have political implications. But it is clear that in the late nineteenth century, education and politics were intricately intertwined. Although Blow did her best to make education a matter of ensuring that children can grow and flourish, many of her contemporaries considered it valuable primarily as a civilizing force. For instance, when kindergarten education was introduced in St. Louis, William Torrey Harris, the superintendent of schools with whom Blow worked closely, cautioned the school board not to expect an advance in intelligence as much as the formation of good habits in young children. This in itself is a valuable function for education to serve, he said, and the preprimary years are an optimal time to do so, because good habits are more easily formed early in a child’s life.52 In large measure, Harris’s goal in pushing for education to begin at a younger age was to extend the period of time they spent in school. He had very little hope that parents would be willing to extend their children’s education at the upper age levels. After all, this was the point at which children in working-class and agricultural households actually became



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useful to their parents. Harris knew and understood this, and he thought that the kindergarten could bring culture, discipline, and good moral and mental habits to the masses at an earlier age, thus producing better citizens. For Blow, on the other hand, education facilitated the gradual process of the unfolding of the self. It awakened a young mind to the universal truths that await discovery. Froebel’s system did more than acquaint children with the material world. It drew children’s attention to properties in the objects around them. The child then could be introduced to contrasts between one object and another, then to the relations between objects, and finally to the universal truths that lay behind those objects. This would not occur in the first year of a child’s education, of course, but kindergarten was a crucial step in the initiation of this process. Similarly, playtime, stories, and games in kindergarten classes were more than recreation. They were exercises in cognitive understanding and self-exploration. Kindergarten education might indeed have a civilizing power, as Harris believed, but this was not its most important function for Blow. It is important not to overstate Harris’s interest in education for citizenship or Blow’s slant toward individual flourishing. The two were colleagues and lifelong friends who agreed on nearly everything related to educational theory and practice. I simply point here to subtle differences in emphasis— differences that may have been related to their professional and gender roles: Harris as the efficient, authoritative (male) school superintendent and later US commissioner of education; Blow as the meticulous, empathic (female) teacher whose main concern was with the welfare of individual students. In addition, these two views could be complementary in practice. Blow’s kindergarten programs could facilitate exactly the kind of cognitive and moral growth she thought necessary. All the while, Harris would congratulate her for producing such fine, well-mannered children who would, no doubt, grow to be fine citizens. If Blow and Harris were consciously aware of their respective foci, it is unlikely either would have objected to the other’s view. Harris also valued children’s intellectual and moral development. He was simply somewhat more concerned with education’s role in society. In a sense, their views are just two

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aspects of the same idealist pedagogy, because flourishing individuals make for good, content, and productive citizens. Blow published her theories in the Progressive Era, when many demographic and cultural shifts were underway in North America. As she aged, she became increasingly disturbed by innovations in early childhood pedagogy that she believed veered off the idealist path. The most problematic in her view were vocationally oriented programs. As will be discussed later, these were the very same programs that were imposed on Native American and African American children. While Blow barely addressed racial/ethnic and economic issues, she did express her disapproval of “industrial” and “manual training” programs, because they turn education into a means, not an end in itself and confuse the roles of the school and civil society. Though overall she approved of John Dewey’s work as a pedagogical theorist, she acknowledged that he sometimes endorsed the “industrial approach” and quoted extensively from his work School and Society throughout the second chapter of her book Educational Issues in the Kindergarten. By this time, Dewey was well known and highly regarded as a philosopher and educational theorist. He and his colleagues believed that childhood education should be linked to social goals and should familiarize children with the world of work. Blow, however, cites an industrial kindergarten that taught children the types of lessons that were the norm in many schools for Native American, African American, and immigrant children. In one school, children learned about the uses of the potato, for instance, helping to dig, clean, peel, and cook the vegetable. They then learned how to make starch and use it to iron doll clothes. This all sounds like a fairly useful series of educational exercises, but in Blow’s view, it is completely misguided. First, it marches children through mundane tasks that do not engage them in imaginative, play-based learning. Second, the school is meant to function as a transitional institution between the private realm of home/family and the public realm of civil society. Education, thought Blow, is not meant to replicate the world of business/industry. Blow and other neo-Hegelians in this era agreed that there are five institutions that provide the foundation for human action and experience:



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family, school, church, civil society, and state. The family is the starting point and consists of a unity, not a plurality, of persons. Members of a family live together in harmony in a relation of mutual love. Within a family, there is no need for individuation or competition. Civil society, by contrast, is the realm in which individuals assert themselves as independent agents, performing duties, demanding rights, and exchanging goods and services for the sake of mutual gain. The state gives order to and protects the other institutions, even though its existence depends on the participation of its citizens.53 Both the school and the church are intermediate institutions, in Blow’s neoHegelian view, which facilitate the passage from the private world of the family to the public world of civil society. From this perspective, school should not be put to use for business, commercial, or political purposes, because it is more like the family—a community that exists for the purposes of nurturing and sustaining the individuals within it. Students should not be encouraged to look for reward or other external incentives, but should be taught to seek academic growth for its own sake. Education in the fullest sense of the word should be the only aim of the school. In Blow’s view, Dewey’s methods failed in this sense, because they blurred the distinction between the purpose of education and the work of civil society.54 It is difficult to square Blow’s objection to the “industrial training” of Dewey’s educational program with her silence on the effect of this trend on Native American and African American education. Based on her overall theories, she should have been appalled and denounced the vocational training, disguised as education, that was imposed on many indigenous and African American communities in North America. Sadly, however, she seems to have done her best to ignore educational theories and practices outside white classrooms.

Early Childhood Education—A Mixed Legacy Throughout the nineteenth century, education had a complex mix of aims and purposes. This is especially true of early childhood education. As early

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as the 1780s, there were “infant schools” or play schools in Europe. They were generally the purview of the wealthy who wanted a safe environment where very young children could play and be nurtured, relieving their parents (generally mothers) of childcare duties. In the early 1800s, the philanthropist Robert Owen decided to establish one of the first charity schools for poor children as part of his New Lanark utopian community in Scotland. Owen was a progressive who embraced Pestalozzi’s theories, so his school used some of the most enlightened and child-centered techniques known in his day. For the majority of poor children, however, early childhood education was a different story. Charity schools were usually linked to welfare and reform efforts, aiming partly to provide genuine help and support to poor families, partly to pressure them to assimilate to the values of the dominant culture. Mission schools were a species of charity schools, established by religious organizations for the purposes of not only educating children and pushing assimilation but winning converts as well. The legacy of charity and mission schools in North America is long and often painful for the communities that experienced them. In such schools, Susan Blow’s ideal of initiating the “unfolding” of a child turned sour. The process of awakening young minds and transforming lives quickly turned into an agenda: “civilize” the masses. Despite the efforts of many men and women to use education as a positive force, the dangers of using education as a tool of assimilation were especially acute for minority populations. Across the Americas, schools had been established by missionaries alongside pioneer trading posts in the 1600s and 1700s with their primary purpose being to “civilize” indigenous people and convert them to Christianity. The United States, Canada, and Mexico all had their own versions of the mission school, with varying levels of freedom and coercion built into their mixed mission. In Canada, most schools for indigenous children were first under the direction of the Catholic Church, though Protestant denominations played a hand over time as well. In the United States, the majority of such schools had been established by religious groups on Native American reservations but, by the late 1800s,



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were administered by federal appointees in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. US and Canadian schools for indigenous youth came to be notorious as centers of abuse and denial of cultural expression. In Mexico, official efforts to educate indigenous children came much later, with the first state-sponsored schools appearing in the 1920s. Yet, there were earlier sporadic efforts to “civilize” indigenous children in Mexico, which aligned with assimilative education in the north. In all three countries, many of these schools were established with lofty educational ideals in mind but, over time, became vehicles for imposing the values of the dominant culture on indigenous people. In recent years, Canada has undergone a reconciliation process to disclose and confront the damage caused by these schools.55 For a short period of time in the United States, however, relatively liberal policies were implemented in Native American schools when William Hailmann oversaw tribal education. Hailmann was a Swiss immigrant and a friend and colleague of William Torrey Harris, who was well versed in the pedagogical theories of both Pestalozzi and Froebel. He and his wife, Eudora Lucas Hailmann, worked together to establish kindergartens and teacher training programs in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Indiana, before William was appointed superintendent of tribal schools in 1894. Committed to improving conditions in these schools, especially in light of the Dawes Act of 1887, which made residential schools compulsory, the couple introduced early childhood education programs and normal schools for teacher training on many reservations.56 Hailmann was a person of his time who had some paternalistic attitudes toward indigenous communities. Yet, his approach to Native American education and cultural identity was among the most progressive of his day. His approach stood in direct opposition to educators and policy makers like Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School, who is now notorious for his genocidal-sounding tough-love metaphor: “Kill the Indian in the man. Save the man.”57 Hailmann maintained that whites who wish to educate Native Americans must know “the Indian as an Indian,” and must acquaint

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themselves with “the home environment . . . as well as the habits, wisdom, and ideals” of the families whose children they teach.58 His approach to tribal education looked especially enlightened compared to the era that followed. When Esther Reel became the superintendent of Indian schools in 1898, she focused on students’ “productivity”—the volume of beadwork by young children; how effectively youth cleaned their own classrooms; the number of blankets, baskets, and moccasins young women made; the hours of farm work performed by young men; yield of crops on reservation farms. Rather than concentrating on students’ cognitive and moral development as progressive educators would have her do, Reel focused on little else than making Native American children “useful” to the dominant culture under the guise of education. In office until 1910, Reel set an agenda for Native American schools in the United States that it would take decades to dismantle. Thankfully, many of the teachers who began working in Native American schools during Hailmann’s tenure continued to teach for a decade or more after his dismissal, thus extending his legacy and influence, at least to a degree.

Education and Opportunity: Beyond the Vocation/ Culture Debates Emma Johnson Goulette worked to bring progressive education to indigenous communities while honoring native heritage. It was sometimes a hard balance to maintain. After the first decade of the twentieth century, she joined with other Native American leaders like herself to form the Society for American Indians. Several women were members of this group, among them: Angel De Cora, a Winnebago artist; Zit-kala-sa/Gertrude Bonin, a Yankton Sioux musician, writer, and activist; Laura Cornelius Kellogg, an Oneida activist; Marie L. Baldwin, an attorney and member of the Chippewa tribe; and Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, a Mohawk woman (discussed in Chapter 4). Evidence points to only Goulette as a trained early childhood educator, however, and she served as SAI’s chair for education for a number of years.



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Like Susan Blow and others, Goulette emphasized the importance of using appropriate “materials, lessons, and methods . . . to assist [a] child in forming desirable habits, [such as] clear systematic thinking, industry, carefulness, thoroughness, orderliness, economy, respect for others and their rights, obedience, and unselfishness.”59 Only well-trained teachers who have received quality instruction in a normal school, she said, are qualified to do this. And in Goulette’s view, the best teachers will be both intellectually and morally competent—“genuine civilizers” able to train “humanity’s mind, character, soul, and hand.”60 As a woman of Native American heritage working in indigenous schools, Goulette faced a constellation of issues that did not affect women who lived and worked in white middle-class environments. She spent the majority of her time addressing these issues in her papers and speeches. The first such issue is the same one European-heritage women were forced to address in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: acceptance as equals and access to opportunities. Although women had been urging for consideration as moral and intellectual equals since the white intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, ironically, white women continued to perpetuate racism and cultural bias against people of color in this period. In fact, as they jockeyed for position and privilege within the social hierarchy, white women were sometimes the worst offenders. People of color had to wage their own battles against racist policies and culturally biased practices. And as is now well recognized, women of color had a dual struggle as they sought to get past both racial and gender barriers. It should come as no surprise, then, that pan-Africanism and pan-Indianism arose in the same time period in North America—after the turn of the twentieth century. Leaders in both cultural groups began to recognize that their struggles for justice and equal consideration were shared by others of African and indigenous heritage. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the SAI were formed in 1909 and 1911, respectively. They were each initiated by people of color but supported by white advocates who shared their concerns. Some

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intellectuals and activists took their race/ethnic consciousness to the next level, building coalitions across cultures—between people of African heritage and indigenous heritage.61 As an early childhood educator who also trained normal school students in pedagogy, Goulette saw the demoralizing effects of discrimination on young adults who were eager to enter the classroom as teachers: I regret very much that the majority of the people of the Caucasian race of the United States do not recognize the ability of the Indian to compete with the white race. So often we have found that the Indian who has received training in higher education has gone back and worked very energetically [but] received very little recognition and very little encouragement. I do not speak for myself only, but also for the boys and girls whom I have had the pleasure of teaching.62 She points here to an educational impasse of sorts: Native students with high aspirations—both male and female—had few ways to make use of their newly acquired academic competencies. They faced two threats: The white world had many opportunities available, but due to racism these opportunities were not open to them. The indigenous world was open to them, but offered few opportunities to use their newly acquired knowledge. While Goulette struggled with these realities as a mentor, white contemporaries like Susan Blow were actively recommending their European-heritage protégés for teaching positions in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis, and seeing all of them placed.63 Goulette was well known and respected in Native American circles, but was she able to help disciples with job placement in an educational hierarchy run by and for European Americans? The first solution Goulette proposed is obvious, but by no means simple: dismantle racism, and begin with the upper levels of leadership in indigenous schools. If a school superintendent, for instance, is “interested in humanity,” he would “not speak to the Indians as if they were dogs.” Egalitarian leadership would provide an environment in which mutual trust could develop and real



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learning could thrive.64 The other solution that Goulette proposed in her own Native American context is to work across lines of race, culture, and class to recruit more nonindigenous teachers: I have visited the best schools in Chicago and St Louis. In these colleges, as well as the training school in Philadelphia from which I graduated, I found the college girls . . . to be very much interested in the Indian, and many asked how they could secure positions among the Indians. . . . Can the Government afford [to hire] incapable, disinterested, non-progressive persons when the public and the world expect governmental institutions to be model schools?65 This was a controversial suggestion—across minority communities in this era— given the naivete and cultural insensitivity of even well-intentioned Europeanheritage teachers. For instance, one white woman who taught at a Sioux school reported that she found her young students eager to study nature, receptive to the playtime and games she taught them, and generally open to learning. Yet as a nonindigenous teacher, she also imported a sense of cultural superiority into her teaching. Although she applauded her students’ ability to share and be cooperative—“We find among them no idea of ‘mine and thine’”—she saw their lack of possessiveness as a weakness: “One of the first things we do in our kindergarten is to give the child the feeling of ownership. . . . ‘Ownership widens personality by giving it power to work . . . and to satisfy the feeling of fellowship by sharing it with others.’”66 Similarly, at one time this young woman condemns the “savage” tendencies she imagines her students inherited from their ancestors, while romanticizing their reverence for nature—all with an eye to converting them to dominant/Christian values: “Like Hiawatha they adopted all nature. Animals were their brothers . . . Very tenderly they would look into a nest to see how many eggs, the color and size, then hurry away, for they said, ‘The mama bird cried for them to go away.’ The beautiful world of nature is opened to them and [this] cannot but help to refine and bring them nearer to God.” In the end, this teacher says that

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kindergarten pedagogy makes “the paths of learning pleasant,” and closes by saying, “Of course the keynote of our work is love.”67 This white woman’s views are typical of well-intentioned teachers who were ignorant about indigenous beliefs and culture. Some European-heritage teachers began their work at residential schools with optimism but soon became overwhelmed by the vast cultural differences they faced as well as the poverty they witnessed. Those who were able to overcome the culture shock and limited resources at Native American schools must have found fulfillment in living and learning within indigenous communities. For instance, Sarah Mather taught at a number of Native schools—in St. Augustine, in the Dakotas, at Pine Ridge, and at the prestigious Cherokee Rosebuds School for girls—and seems to have found it rewarding.68 Even so, this complex of issues, combined with the legacy of violence and oppression indigenous peoples experienced at the hand of whites throughout the nineteenth century, made Goulette’s suggestion to recruit more white teachers a painful one to consider. When Goulette participated in this discussion at the annual meeting of the Society of American Indians in 1915, regressive and restrictive policies were firmly in place in indigenous communities. In one sense she was angry and frustrated with the slow pace of change. Yet she also seems to have maintained a degree of optimism. This may be in part because she began her work as a teacher during the short window of time that Hailmann oversaw the Indian schools. Esther Reel was no longer at the helm as superintendent of Indian schools, so she was aware that political winds can shift quickly—for good as well as for ill. She seems to have had hope that, with hard work and strong political advocacy, the situation would improve. As damaging as the “manual training” approach to education was to Native American cultures and identities, it was part of a larger trend that also impacted African Americans and immigrant communities. The discussion of the purpose of education—vocational training or liberal arts education— fueled debates across race and gender throughout the nineteenth century. In the mid-1870s, white educators in St. Louis debated the merits of a liberal



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arts curriculum versus specialized vocational training. Not surprisingly, the discussion reflected economic biases. Those arguing for vocational training asserted that it was the best educational option for working-class and immigrant youth. Those who favored liberal arts education maintained that students exposed to higher-level concepts would develop more intellectual depth and become the leaders of tomorrow. Then, as now, and as is true across cultures, some educators preferred not to choose one approach over the other, but to assert that the two can and should work in tandem.69 On its face, the debate in St. Louis was a friendly one among relative equals—all of whom were white males—discussing the best approach to education for children/youth in general, though we can now see that they actually had only white students in mind. At the time that this debate took place among white educators, the St. Louis school board had only recently begun to fully fund public education for African American students. Publicly funded kindergarten education would not be available to “colored” children in St. Louis for another seven years; a normal school for teacher training for African American young adults would not open until 1890. It is clear that these white educators were engaged in a discussion of how to manage the education of youth only within the dominant culture. And when they applied their ideas to the education of “others,” the results were sometimes disastrous, as in the Native American residential schools, discussed earlier. The vocational training versus liberal arts discussion within the African American community may have reached its height in the Progressive Era as played out between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B DuBois. As is well known among educators, historians, and philosophers, Washington favored vocational training to ensure that young adults would gain mastery over a trade and thus find a definite career path. This, he believed, would lead to economic independence, which would then lead to cultural uplift. DuBois endorsed liberal arts education for a “Talented Tenth” of African Americans to develop the intellectual abilities needed to enter the professional class, gain higher social status, and bring about political change. Washington’s critics

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charged that his approach guaranteed African Americans would remain in working-class careers and thus become a service class. DuBois’s critics complained that his approach was not practical and that his “Talented Tenth” was elitist, pure and simple. Women of color within early childhood education often rejected the Washington-DuBois dichotomy. In most cases, they tried to navigate between the two views. Mary Church Terrell expresses this mediating view well: Play is an activity which is its own reward. Work is an activity having a definite aim. The Kindergarten is the mediation of the two. . . . In the Kindergarten, the little one finds an atmosphere especially congenial. Here he finds new playthings, new plays, new associates. Here his activity is guided, not repressed. . . . His teacher is free to note his individuality and give it expression, helping him to adapt himself to [interact] with his equally free fellow-playmates.70 Josephine Silone Yates was one of the first African American women to be certified as a teacher in the state of Rhode Island. Therefore, she was well versed in a range of pedagogical theories and insisted that African American parents and teachers need not choose between what was often called “culture study” and vocational training. The liberal arts can inform vocational training and advance African American achievement more effectively than strict adherence to only one approach to education. Mary Church Terrell was among the most privileged of African American women in this era, and while she tried to reject the dichotomy, she sometimes accepted a class-biased view that middle-class children benefit from liberal arts training and working-class children benefit from vocational training. Yet, like Emma Johnson Goulette, Terrell was aware that vocational training could be a double-edged sword for children and youth of color. Emma Johnson Goulette saw a degree of promise in vocational training for children with indigenous heritage. Yet as a woman of color herself she struggled against an overtly assimilationist agenda that was then in full force



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at reservation schools in the United States and Canada. She urged Native American students to break out of the mold indigenous schools forced them into, saying, “We are not all agriculturists . . . our younger generation [should] not to be afraid to step out and say, . . . ‘I am a carpenter.’ ‘I am a blacksmith.’ ‘I am a physician’ and [prove] to the world that we are capable.”71 The majority of white educators in Susan Blow’s era only vaguely acknowledged the value of early childhood education for minority children or poor whites, or did so with varying degrees of elitism. Maintaining her ideal of using education to promote a child’s full flourishing, Blow once noted that Froebelian teaching methods help both rich and poor children, but in different ways: It is difficult to tell which class—poor or rich—the kindergarten benefits most. . . . If he is a child of poverty, he is saved by the good associations and the industrial and intellectual training that he gets. If he is a child of wealth, he is saved by the kindergarten from ruin through self-indulgence and the corruption ensuing on weak management in the family.72 Even so, had Blow and Harris not so readily acquiesced to racism in St. Louis, they might have awakened to the value of early childhood education for empowering young children, not only across the socioeconomic divide but across races and cultures as well. The two could have led the call for full and fair access to public education without regard to race throughout the United States, and helped to eradicate racism. Within their own circles of influence, they were certainly in a position to have done so. Their relative silence on the matter and accommodation of racist attitudes were immense moral failures by their own pedagogical and philosophical standards. The challenges that racism and poverty presented to minority communities throughout the continent were significant, of course. Within the African American community, Terrell, Yates, and others saw education as a way to face them. Speaking about the dangers that poor street children are subject to, Terrell asserted that “through the kindergarten alone . . . shall we be able

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to save countless thousands of our little ones who are going to destruction before our very eyes.”73 The same sense of the transformative power of early childhood education that Blow embraced was also present for Terrell, but there was more at stake. African American children in the age of Jim Crow were in danger, not simply of becoming wanderers in the street, but of becoming victims of the harsh vagrancy laws, convict lease system, and lynch mobs in place throughout most southern states and many northern states in the United States. As Terrell’s peer in early childhood advocacy, Josephine Silone Yates, said, African Americans were “passing through a fiery ordeal,” in this era.74 And both women often spoke about the need to instill a sense of cultural pride in young children. Yates does so with passion at one point: It is exceedingly necessary at this critical stage in our development . . . to foster within our young people that sort of race pride that will enable us religiously to believe that some good things may come out of Nazareth, i.e., out of our own race.75 Yet, with these concerns in mind, both Yates and Terrell sometimes defaulted to speaking as if they endorsed a charity-kindergarten model, like other privileged women who saw early childhood education as an instrument of social reform. Yates once declared that “Negro criminals do not come from the educated, refined classes . . . but from the most illiterate, the stupid, the besotted element; from the class that has not been reached by the moral side of education.”76 Sarah Cooper, a wealthy white woman in San Francisco, once conjectured that private charity kindergartens in San Francisco helped reduce crime. Terrell shared this view: “The whole effect of the Kindergarten system tends to prevent crime, and too great an estimate cannot be placed upon [saving] the child from becoming a criminal.”77 African-heritage educators did not shy away from identifying racism as a key component of African American social problems, however. Josephine Silone Yates, Mary Church Terrell, and the educator-activist Anna Murray each called white leadership to account on occasion. In her efforts to lobby for



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full funding of kindergarten education throughout the South, Anna Murray reminded her white audience that “the stream of amalgamation started with the institution of slavery [and] it cannot be turned back.” She then asked, “Is it not then the part of wisdom to train us up in all the ways of your civilization [by fully funding public education]?”78 It was a rhetorical question, of course. One to which she did not receive a positive response. Many states were determined to remain segregated in this era. As we saw in St. Louis, white leadership failed to provide public funding or only minimal funding for schools for African American children. In such cases, Yates urged for action: Wherever the law provides for a separate system . . . as in the South . . . here the work of establishing kindergartens rests largely upon mothers’ clubs, or even upon individual effort. Where kindergartens are supplied to white children and the system is supposed to grant equal facilities, though in separate schools, our women . . . are urged to present the needs, the special needs, of colored children for this department of training.79 In this sense, Yates and her African American coworkers turned the ideals of femininity that held currency at this time into a call for action. Interestingly enough, their activism aligned with a feminized version of the vocation/ culture debate in education: women as mothers, teachers, and caretakers.

Education and Professionalizing Motherhood Within women’s and feminist circles, the vocation/culture discussion within education converged with an ideal of women as mothers/nurturers that Susan Blow and many other women educators embraced. Second-wave feminists harshly criticized this ideal as “the cult of domesticity.”80 Yet there is no denying that it contributed to the professionalization of motherhood, thereby opening a realm of career options for women—in education, health, and social welfare. Before the rise of the women’s suffrage movement in the 1840s, white women like Catharine Beecher, Sarah Hale, and Lydia Sigourney applauded

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“domestic education” for women to prepare them to be wives and mothers. Ladies’ preparatory schools started to be established during this time, with courses in cooking, sewing, and handicrafts, as well as lessons in hosting social events. This was true across national boundaries and cultures: Adelaide Hunter Hoodless was one of Canada’s champions of domestic science in the late nineteenth century, authoring the “Little Red Book” on home sanitation and hygiene at the behest of the minister of education.81 Clara Root, a woman raised on an Arapaho reservation, studied and promoted domestic science within indigenous culture.82 Schools for young women of color required courses in domestic work and sometimes hosted dinners and tea parties to showcase students’ skills, as described in the announcement in The Southern Workman that follows. Elements of programs like these lingered in women’s colleges well into the twentieth century: The Domestic Science Tea Shop . . . is very successfully and attractively managed . . . Hampton girls bake the food in cooking classes and in their spare time, and on their work days prepare and serve it at the tea room. All the work is under the supervision of domestic-science teachers. The girls are paid by the hour for service at the tea shop and for work done outside of domestic classes. Delicious toasted English muffins, nut bread, cinnamon toast, oatmeal cookies, and irresistible cakes testify to their skill and excellent training.83 While early childhood education as a career option widened women’s sphere considerably by professionalizing what had been the private work of mothers in the home, ultimately it was rooted in traditional views of women. As noted at the opening of this chapter, such views originated with Aristotle and were given new life by Hegel. In addition, many women embraced the romantic notion of “women’s sphere” that was so valorized in the nineteenth century— across races and cultures. Sarah Hale and Catharine Beecher worked alongside other conservatives who favored the complementarity principle of gender roles: men as the heads



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of the household and leaders in the public world of business, industry, and politics; women as men’s helpmates who remained fulfilled in the private world of home and family. Like today’s conservative critics, Hale and Beecher believed the feminist movement of their day was hostile to men, denigrated women’s traditional role in the home, was anti-motherhood, and eroded family values. As the nineteenth century progressed, they distrusted and resented liberal feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. And the feeling was mutual. Anthony derisively referred to marriage as “man marriage” because men had so much power and authority within it. Stanton once confronted Beecher, declaring that her campaign to educate women would inevitably lead them to demand full participation in politics. Beecher conceded the point but continued with her work.84 Like so many women in her era, Susan Blow shared the view that women were best suited for domestic/maternal work. By all accounts, she thoroughly enjoyed working with young children and educating women—both teachers and mothers—about childhood development as it was understood in her day. And she invested much time and energy to demonstrating that early childhood education was “spiritual motherhood.” Women were not suited for the “industrial realm,” as she called it—the world of business or politics. Instead, they have natural inclinations toward care and nurture that can and should be developed in the early childhood classroom. Blow also embraced the ideal of the “eternal feminine”85 and accepted Hegel’s emphasis on the family as the foundation of society. In Hegel’s understanding, a woman is a wholly internal and subjective individual with no need to assert her selfhood in the public sphere. In his view, a woman finds “her full substantive place,” in the home, a wholly subjective and preethical realm. She is fully self-actualized in her roles, first as an obedient daughter, then as a wife whose primary role is to please her husband, and finally as a mother who tends to her children.86 In appropriating Hegel, Blow linked her philosophy of womanhood to her pedagogical theories, asserting the importance of both child and mother simultaneously. She saw the family as an institution that grew out of children’s

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need for care, and even went so far as to call “the little child . . . pioneer of the process which created human institutions.”87 In this sense, Blow did more than simply romanticize childhood. She made women central to the care and nurture of children, and thus appended onto child-rearing responsibility for the healthy development of society’s foundational institution, the family. As noted earlier, the field of education quickly became women’s domain in the mid-/late nineteenth century. Many women educators embraced the view that women are inherently different from men. Blow agreed with this conservative view and considered women’s difference from men to be worthy of not simply recognition but reverence. Along with others, Blow insisted that one of the most valuable things women could do was to become properly educated so they could instruct children and thus regenerate all of human life by “enhancing the sanctity and uplifting the ideals of family life.”88 Scores of women held similar views and expressed them in and through discussions of pedagogy. Both Mary Church Terrell and Josephine Silone Yates accepted the view that women are (or should be) maternal and nurturing. Terrell urged her peers of African heritage to embrace their role as mothers and “be thoroughly aroused to their duty to the children.” But in the Jim Crow context in which women of color lived, it was not enough to exercise maternal influence. Terrell added that women needed to “be consumed with desire to save [children] from lives of degradation and shame” caused by racism and poverty.89 Terrell and Yates also believed that good training in both household management and child-rearing was necessary for many women of African heritage, who were not “vicious and depraved,” but simply “ignorant and poor.”90 Yates did so, however, with an awareness that elitism could be damaging. Through observation, she and other educators learned that “mothers’ clubs, day nurseries, kindergartens [and] . . . other institutions so managed as to preserve the independence of the one helped” are necessary to inspire and support mothers and teachers.91 Within the African American community, a version of this view of women was linked to a sense of duty to serve as a catalyst for change in



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their communities. Mary Church Terrell, who was economically privileged, experienced racial biases herself as a child and lost a longtime friend to racial violence.92 Though she comes across as paternalistic in her references to poor people of color, it appears that she genuinely wanted to help improve their living conditions. She was especially concerned with the plight of poor women of color: “It is useless to talk about elevating the race if we do not come into close touch with the masses of our women,” she said. “Even though we wish to shun them, and hold ourselves entirely aloof from them, we cannot escape the consequences of their acts. . . . [We must] go down among the lowly, the illiterate, and even the vicious to whom we are bound by the ties of race and sex, and put forth every possible effort to uplift them.”93 In Yates’s view, there is little of the feminine sentimentality that is so common in white women’s discourse. African American women needed to be proactive advocates for their own children and all children of color. Participation in local women’s clubs made this work somewhat easier, since there is indeed power in numbers. At the same time, African American women concerned about early childhood education had a set of burdens to bear: Being heard as women. Being heard as mothers or teachers of young children. Being heard as women of color in a racist world whose children of color deserve a quality education. Given the context in which some African-heritage women lived, in some cases, self-advocacy simply was not enough. They needed allies. Although white women did less than we might wish to help women of color gain equal access to education for their children, there were a few bright spots along the way. Some wealthy white women followed Mary Church Terrell’s example and provided generous funding for kindergarten classrooms, teachers, or entire schools and programs for African American children, among them Phoebe Hearst (Washington, D.C.; 1899),94 Katrina Trask Peabody, (Columbus, Georgia; 1905),95 Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt and Frances Farnam Pack (Asheville, North Carolina; 1892 and 1894).96 White women of less privilege sometimes helped raise funds to provide kindergarten education to children of color, sometimes as a project of their women’s clubs, other times as individuals.

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For example, Ruth Cravath, wife of Fisk University’s first president, helped raise funds for Fisk’s model school, and the Palmetto Club of Daytona raised money to support kindergarten education for African American children in Florida.97 While segregation was firmly in place and there is often a fine line between providing assistance and exercising paternal control, at least there were efforts to cross lines of race and culture in constructive ways. On a deeper level, women in early childhood education nurtured connections with each other across cultures. Mary Church Terrell, Josephine Silone Yates, and Margaret Murray Washington attended meetings of the white National Council of Women (NCW) on occasion, and Yates was once a major speaker at an NCW annual meeting. Many white educators and politicians supported Anna Murray’s effort to win full public funding for kindergarten for all children in Washington, D.C., for instance, saying that her work would be “crowned with success” and that she “deserves the gratitude of the race with which she is identified and the assistance and sympathy of all who believe in and labor for the spread of the kindergarten system.”98 In addition, white editors of education magazines provided updates and feature articles about African American, Native American, and Chinese American schools, teachers, and programs, which kept the needs, interests, and innovations by women of color present in the consciousness of the dominant culture, at least to a degree. Mary Church Terrell led the effort to call for more proactive involvement, however, pointing directly to the racist policies and practices that her white contemporaries participated in: Let the Association of colored women ask the white mothers of this country to teach their children that when they grow to be men and women, if they deliberately prevent their fellow creatures from earning their daily bread, by closing the doors of trade against them, the Father of all men will hold them responsible for the crimes, which are the result of their injustice, and for the human wrecks which the ruthless crushing of hope and ambition always makes.99



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Just after the turn of the twentieth century, there is evidence of action, at least among white progressives. Patty Smith Hill began nurturing relationships between Euro-heritage and African-heritage educators in Kentucky. By 1907 the white Kindergarten Union in Louisville announced that the African American kindergarten network was now a member of the formerly all-white kindergarten association in the city.100 By the 1910s, more white women were speaking out about racial inclusion. Anna Garlin Spencer provides one example: How shall these United States fitly profit by the wealth of human variety that is now being poured into its melting pot, except the true value of each child is early discovered and developed? It is meet and fitting that in an International Kindergarten Union this great question of racial association should be discussed. Here, if anywhere, may we not clearly see that the little black child has something to give the white child, as the white the black?101 Susan Blow’s one-time disciple, Lucy Wheelock provides another: The teacher’s responsibility for democracy does not end when her school hours are over. . . . She gathers mothers from different racial groups in her mothers’ meetings. She reconciles racial prejudices and antagonisms. . . . The teacher who is training little citizens to love law and order, to respect the rights of others, to work and play together, to understand American ideals and follow them—is she not the maker of democracy?102 Wheelock’s sentiments, expressed four years after Susan Blow’s death, set the stage for the progressive pedagogical theory and practices that would develop in the decades to come.

Conclusion In a sense, the pedagogical project for which Susan Blow laid the foundation was a classically Eurocentric one, and this may explain (though certainly not

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excuse) her failure to face and address racial and cultural exclusion in education. She was committed to the Western masculinist concept of the “generic person” whose mind, selfhood, and moral growth could be examined and discussed on an abstract level. And she sought to place that person in an equally abstract universe where relations between concepts existed in a metaphysical world of ideas, far removed from lived experience. Idealism, she said, is “the only philosophy which adequately interprets . . . educational procedure.”103 Seeking to make idealism not only intelligible to her readers, but applicable to their work as educators, she spoke the language of male Eurocentric philosophy, but to a feminine audience that was at least somewhat culturally diverse. Blow’s aim was to provide a system that would make manifest the rationality that Hegel claimed permeated all of life, and in as unlikely a place as the kindergarten classroom. Such abstractions rarely fit lived experience, however. While Blow was convinced that “every error of practice [is] an error in philosophy,”104 she was tone-deaf to the challenges minority communities faced and seemingly unaware of her own complicity in racial oppression in St. Louis. Goulette, Terrell, and Yates made use of the best aspects of her theories— and, no doubt, read Froebel, Pestalozzi, and other thinkers independently—to develop theories of early childhood education that were relevant to their own communities. As the strength of Blow’s nonempirical theories faded, fewer and fewer educators read her books over time. Yet this philosophy that was hidden for over a century has a good deal to offer, perhaps primarily because it was a philosophy for women by a woman.

3 Feminist Philosophers/ Educators Anna Brackett, Grace Bibb, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Ana Roqué

Education quickly became a professional domain for intellectually minded women in the United States in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean were soon to follow suit. Yet, women’s role as educators often closely corresponded with traditional views of gender complementarity. So, the women discussed in Chapter 2 who accepted early childhood education as a form of “spiritual motherhood” were fully compliant with gender expectations. They were professionals, yes, but they were professionals who did work appropriate to women: caring for young children, nurturing them, and gently leading them to the next stages of growth. Leaders in education, the feminist-friendly William Torrey Harris included, considered women to be better suited to teaching in the lower grades. Generally speaking, men were thought to be better qualified to be secondary school teachers and school principals. Each of the women discussed in this chapter stands as an exception to this general rule. Anna Brackett was principal of the normal school (for teacher preparation) in St. Louis, Missouri—reportedly the first woman to serve as

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principal of a secondary school in the United States. Brackett’s associate in St. Louis, Grace Bibb, also a white woman, served as assistant principal when Brackett returned to the eastern United States. Bibb continued on in educational leadership, serving as the dean of the normal school at the University of Missouri in Columbia (1878–83), and has been lauded as the first woman to hold that position at a coeducational institution in North America. Fanny Jackson Coppin succeeded in becoming the first woman of color in the United States to serve as principal of a secondary school (1869–1906); she is quite likely to be the first woman to hold that position for more than three decades. She also established a normal school within the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Rita Cetina Gutiérrez and Dolores Correa Zapata were the first women in Mexico to establish a secondary school for girls, with Cetina serving as its principal—another “first” for women in her country. Finally, Ana Roqué holds the same position of esteem in the Caribbean. She was the first woman to serve as principal of a normal school. She was also the first woman to become a dean at a university—off the United States mainland—at the predecessor to the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. The achievements of these women as “firsts” are in themselves worth celebrating, but in the context of this volume, the ideas they produced are significant. In most cases, each of these women’s ideas represents the liberal feminist “mainstream” in North America today. Their work is historically significant, because so many of their ideas were accepted and integrated into everyday practice. We have to remind ourselves that when many of these women were teaching and writing, the US Supreme Court had just ruled against the right of Virginia Minor to vote and Myra Bradwell to practice law.1 The United States, Canada, and Mexico were all decades away from approving voting rights for women. Significant limits on women’s higher education were in place across the continent. Jim Crow policies were intensifying in the southern United States, and public education was nonexistent for African Americans in many parts of the United States. Indigenous rights were in jeopardy throughout the continent. And on the cusp of the twentieth century,



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Puerto Rico and other former Spanish territories were placed under US colonial rule. In short, it was a very different world in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Within this context, each of the women in this chapter made contributions to educational and feminist thought that were valuable and helped edge us on to higher levels of social and political equality.

Anna Callender Brackett Shortly after her death, Anna Brackett (1836–1911) was described as “one of the most remarkable educators known among women,”2 but until recently her name was unfamiliar. By way of introduction, she was born into an uppermiddle-class white family in Massachusetts. Among her extended family was her cousin Jeffrey Richardson Brackett, who became a central figure in the development of social work as a field of study at the turn of the twentieth century. Brackett attended a private school in Boston before studying at Framingham Normal School in Massachusetts.3 She taught briefly at Framingham, then in Charleston, South Carolina, before becoming principal of the new normal school in St. Louis, Missouri, in the midst of the Civil War.4 Brackett was one of the first women in the United States to serve as principal of a secondary school and was said to have been one of the highest paid in the United States.5 She was among the many women in the St. Louis idealist movement at this time for whom education became an entry point into both philosophy and feminist discourse. She helped launch The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first periodical in the English language devoted solely to philosophy, and was a frequent contributor to this publication. She served as editor of the Boston-based Journal of Education for a time and wrote articles in that publication as well. She also wrote popular pieces for Harper’s Monthly, Century Magazine, and St. Louis Ladies’ Magazine.6 Brackett was well versed in German idealism, having studied the works of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling with fellow educators in St. Louis. She

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was also familiar with the work of their commentators: James Hutchinson Stirling, Franz Hoffman, A. Vera, and Karl Rosenkranz. She is said to have taken “a leading part in the activities of St. Louis, . . . and was one of the most aggressive leaders in the philosophical debates.”7 The New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson was impressed by Brackett, who reminded him of the influential feminist thinker Margaret Fuller. It was an apt comparison. Like Fuller, she was “a most vigorous suffragist,” and a member of the Missouri Woman’s Suffrage Association, the first organization in the United States established solely to promote women’s voting rights. She associated with several pivotal figures, including fellow idealist educators: Mary Beedy, Thomas Davidson, Amelia Fruchte, William Torrey Harris, and Louis Soldan, as well as prominent women’s rights activists: Phoebe Couzins, Virginia Minor, and Rebecca Hazard (Brackett’s next-door neighbor in St. Louis).8 Brackett admired Fuller, writing an article about her in The Radical in December 1871: It is not necessary for one who speaks of Margaret Fuller to defend her from any charge of weakness or want of power. The charge comes from the other quarter, as it does usually to any woman who, by outward circumstance or inner choice, is forced to show . . . the energy of a full life. . . . No one doubted her courage, or firmness, or faithfulness, or patience; but they said she was “masculine” and then there was no more to be said . . .9

Education and Idealism Anna Brackett was committed to philosophically infused pedagogy, though she was not nearly as devoted to German idealism as Susan Blow and some others in the St. Louis circle. In 1871, she provided an overview in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy of an article on Hegel by James Eliot Cabot, thus helping to expand the reach of idealism among the English-reading public.10 As an educator, however, she was more interested in pedagogy, than in philosophy proper. And toward this end, she translated the pedagogical



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theories of Karl Rosenkranz, Hegel’s younger contemporary and disciple. Her translation of Rosenkranz’s Pädagogik als System first appeared in English in JSP as a series of articles, and she published a paraphrase of it as a book five years later.11 The Pedagogics was really an early work in cognitive development and learning psychology—a text that formed the basis of educational theory in St. Louis. It asserted that formal education for infants and young children is necessarily limited, because they are in a “perceptive” or “intuitive” stage of cognition (§84, JSP15:38).12 Playtime should be valued, since it is a sort of material-gathering activity through which young children gain knowledge of the world (§84, JSP15:38). Children aged six to twelve are in a “conceptual” stage, and begin to identify and classify objects of perception, combine perceptions in their imagination, and understand abstract signs and symbols (§91, JSP15:43). For youth, reading plays the same role that playtime does for younger children; adventure, myth, and travel stories take a child out of himself or herself to places unknown. The final stage is the “logical epoch,” in which adolescents and young adults are able to see necessary connections within universal ideas (§100, JSP15:50). This is the work of the true Thinking Activity that Rosenkranz believed is the pinnacle of education, and Brackett agreed with him on this point. Brackett experimented for a time with Pestalozzi-inspired “object lessons” that were developed in Toronto and in Oswego, New York, in the early 1860s and was at first convinced of its value: “Some teaching of this kind should be found in all schools,” she said, because it “possesses a power of awakening and interesting [students] which no mere book recitation can have.”13 But over time her views began to change, possibly due to pressure from William Torrey Harris, who rose from a school principal to the rank of superintendent of schools in St. Louis while Brackett was principal of the normal school. Harris believed object lessons relied too heavily on empirical sense data without providing the conceptual unity needed to attain knowledge. Brackett began to express concerns that object lessons lack “true generalizing power” and could thus lead to arbitrariness in teaching methods.14 In the end, she concluded

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there was a “serious question . . . [about] how much of this system of teaching we shall adopt in our training school.”15

From Normal School Education to Feminism In Brackett’s view, teacher training needed to be more than simply secondary education. Teaching is a profession, such as law or medicine, that “is developed in the special direction of teaching.”16 Therefore, she called for a revision of the normal school curriculum in St. Louis, insisting that teachers require a solid liberal arts education before they can pursue advanced study in a professional field. She also pushed the city’s school board to raise the age for admission to normal school: “The average girl at 16 is only a child, and when she enters the Normal School fresh from Grammar School . . . she suddenly and unexpectedly finds herself baffled and discouraged” by abstract pedagogical theories.17 From a feminist standpoint, Brackett’s interest in upgrading normal school requirements had two effects. First, it called for women educators to be on an equal intellectual plane with their male counterparts in the professions. Under Brackett’s plan, teachers would obtain the same liberal education in secondary school, followed by professional-level training similar to career preparation of lawyers, doctors, or clergy. In addition, raising the age of admission would ensure a higher level of maturity among new teachers; they would not be simply glorified babysitters, as was the case in the pre-normal school era. Girls as young as fourteen were often put in front of a classroom in the nineteenth century. In Brackett’s normal school, they would enter their field with competence and confidence in their abilities, in the manner worthy of a professional. Unfortunately, the school board did not act on Brackett’s recommendations but took steps that would make the normal school an extension of the St. Louis high school. Brackett and her vice principal, Ida Eliot, resigned in protest and returned to the East Coast. The school Brackett and Eliot opened in New York City in 1872 was known for its high academic standards, and students in its preparatory program were



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often automatically admitted to colleges like Vassar with advanced standing.18 Like Brackett, Eliot was from a white upper-middle-class family filled with prominent intellectuals—among them, her uncle, William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr., president of Washington University in St. Louis and his cousins: Charles Norton Eliot, editor of The North American Review; Samuel Eliot, history professor and president of Trinity College (Hartford); and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University.19 The two women were quite likely domestic partners. In both St. Louis and New York, they shared housing, attended social events, and vacationed together. They also raised two children whom they openly referred to as their adopted daughters: Hope (b. 1870) and Bertha (b. 1875). Brackett announced the arrival of their first child in a letter to her friend and fellow intellectual Thomas Davidson: “We have, i.e., Miss Eliot and I, adopted a little protégé of Miss E’s—a little girl now three years old . . . our little Daisy . . . [whose] real name is Hope.”20 The two girls appeared in the Brackett/Eliot household in census records and were listed as daughters, though in some cases with their original surnames: Hope Davison and Bertha Lincoln. A good deal of feminist influence is evident in the girls’ lives. When attending the University of Michigan in 1877–78, Hope boarded at the home of Brackett’s peer in idealist circles, Eliza Sunderland. Years later Sunderland would become the second woman to earn a PhD in philosophy from that institution; her life and work is discussed in volume two. The following year, Hope was awarded a scholarship to Cornell, which had opened its Sage Hall for women a few years earlier. Both Hope and Bertha became teachers.21

Brackett’s Pedagogical Feminism Brackett’s assertion while principal of the normal school in St. Louis, that teaching requires not simply training but professional education, demonstrates how closely connected her normal school theory was to her feminism. In her view, teaching is a profession on par with other professions; therefore, normal school education has a unique purpose:

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No other [school] can take its place or do its work, any more than a medical school can teach law, or a theological seminary, medicine. We are required, not only to cultivate all womanly qualities and to develop mental, moral, and physical powers, but beyond this, to call out and train certain qualities of mind indispensable to a good teacher; and regulations and methods are needed for this end, which would be out of place in a High or Grade School.22 Brackett insisted that teaching be taken seriously. But why is this significant from a feminist point of view? Even at this point in educational history, teaching was a female-dominated profession in the United States. Yet the majority of educational leadership posts were held by men. Brackett knew this and was aware of the gender bias that negatively impacted teacher education. So, while she did speak of cultivating “all womanly qualities” in teachers, unlike many of her contemporaries, her primary convictions did not lie with promoting women’s difference from men, or in nineteenth-century terms, “women’s sphere.” Instead, Brackett’s view was that women are essentially the same as men, but their social roles have restricted them in certain ways. Therefore, she was a pragmatist regarding women in the workforce. Women may have certain characteristics that benefit them in their work as educators: compassion and the ability to encourage and nurture students, for example. They may also bring to their educational work certain weaknesses—sentimentalism, oversubjectivity, and a reticence to be too businesslike.23 Yet in Brackett’s view these strengths and weaknesses were not due to anything innate in women’s nature but resulted from force of habit. In today’s terms, Brackett would be a “liberal” rather than a “maternal” feminist. The only “difference” between the sexes for Brackett was the lack of women’s career opportunities. And teaching was the ideal vocation for them to nurture a sense of both responsibility and independence: [because of] the immense advantage to a woman, as to a man, of an independent self-supporting occupation, no one can more strongly desire [than I do] . . . that every young girl . . . shall be afforded the opportunity of



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[employment] in so honorable a position as that of a teacher, . . . and that she shall not be sent back home, a dependent on the work of others.24 Brackett concludes that men and women “are wonderfully alike, after all.”25 Clearly reconfiguring the Hegelian idea that women were in essence bound to hearth and home, she wanted women to have the same opportunities as men and to reap the same benefits when they became part of the workforce—that is, civil society. Women simply need to develop the same habits as men in order to get there. Brackett made some important feminist innovations to the idealism she was immersed in with her colleagues in St. Louis. She considered women thoroughly capable of reaching the highest levels of cognitive development. In contrast, Hegel, the central figure studied by Brackett and her colleagues, actually claimed that the minds of women “are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts.”26 Brackett further developed her feminist theory in the lead essay of her edited volume, The Education of American Girls. Brackett published The Education of American Girls in 1874, and in a letter to Davidson indicated that she was excited about the project. Updating him on a number of new developments in her life, she wrote hastily, “—have agreed with a NY publisher to edit a woman’s book on Girls’ Education.”27 In this work, she collected essays from members of the female intelligentsia of the day, two of whom had links to the idealist movement: Mary Beedy, St. Louis public school teacher and Philosophical Society participant, and Ednah D. Cheney, lecturer on aesthetics at the Concord School. Brackett’s title essay is for the most part an application of Rosenkranz’s pedagogical theory to women and girls. She observes that generally a young girl is guided through the “perceptive” stage of Rosenkranz’s system. She then moves to the “conceptual” stage, beginning to see objects in their relations to each other, and developing her power of imagination. These first two steps of the learning process are foundational, and in Brackett’s view no girl can excel later in life without having attained them.

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However, women’s education usually stopped at the conceptual stage in this era. They were given a solid primary and adequate secondary education, but after this their education screeched to a halt. Undereducated and untrained in abstract thinking, women would indeed become the arbitrary and capricious creatures that Hegel warned of, if—heaven forbid!—they were to become active in public affairs. Brackett’s solution is to ensure that women are thoroughly educated, so they can be fully capable leaders in any field of their choosing: The cause of the trouble lies, not in their nature, but in their education, [which] is proved by the fact that wherever women have received a thorough training these “charming and bewildering” feminine characteristics . . . are not found.28

Girls and the Family Circle As a follower of both Rosenkranz and Hegel, Brackett accepted contemporary ideals in which children are educated in the home in their earliest years. Both of these thinkers saw the family as an organic relation based on natural bonds of love and mutual affection between parent and child.29 In their view, the nature of family life is such that its members do not have a distinct and separate existence but are a unity that has a shared set of aims and interests. Therefore, members of a family need not petition for “rights” or compete with each other for status or esteem. Brackett agreed that the love and nurture an individual receives within the family are indispensable. The education the family provides is also essential to growth and development. But while she didn’t question the Hegel-Rosenkranz idealization of the role of the family, she did make a feminist amendment to it. Namely, she pointed out that, because girls are often confined to only the family circle, their intellectual and moral development suffers. They do not get the chance to assert their independence and gain the confidence and skills needed to succeed in public life. Young men, on the other hand, enter into civil society, the realm in which, as Hegel observed, individuals are separated from



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the family thereby becoming independent persons.30 Without the chance to test themselves outside the confines of home and family, girls face two dangers. First, they grow to be ineffective in the public realm. Second, and of more danger to their personal well-being, they are vulnerable to exploitation by others. This argument is at the heart of Brackett’s call for coeducation, especially in the teenage and young adult years. She noted that opposition to coeducation “implied [more] than appears on the surface; for, in reality, co-education and higher education for women are almost synonymous terms.”31 Coeducation helps women as well as men achieve the American ideal of individual selfdetermination. She might have said the same about the effects of racial integration in education but, as noted earlier, seems to have been utterly tonedeaf in this regard. Ironically enough, there is no evidence that she objected to the school board’s failure to provide an adequate education to children of color in St. Louis after the Civil War. As previously noted (see “Introduction”), African American youth were denied secondary education in the city until 1875 when Sumner High School was established. No normal school education was provided for African-heritage youth under Brackett’s leadership. It was not until 1880 that a teacher training program was introduced at Sumner; an independent normal school was not established for another decade.

Sexuality and Education Women’s delicate health and emotional fragility were invoked in the nineteenth century as justification for denying (white) women educational and employment opportunities. There do not seem to have been parallel claims made about the delicacy of women of color in the United States in this era, although similar arguments appeared in Latin America. Brackett challenged the delicacy argument full force on more than one occasion. In her paraphrase of Rosenkranz’s Pedagogics, for instance, she debunks his claim that girls’ physical education should be limited, so they will not become Amazons.32 This is not surprising, as Brackett is said to have been a rather accomplished

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equestrian, and in her popular writings advocated improvements in women’s health and physical fitness generally: The German idea of a woman’s whole duty—to knit, to sew, and to obey implicitly—is perhaps accountable for what Rosenkranz here says of exercise as regards girls. We, however, who know that the most frequent direct cause of debility and suffering in our young women is simply and solely a want of muscular strength, may be pardoned for dissenting from his opinion, and for suggesting that dancing is not a sufficient equivalent for the more violent games of their brothers. We do not fear to render them Amazons by giving them more genuine and systematic exercise, both physically and intellectually.33 “Sex in Education,” Brackett’s closing essay in her edited volume, The Education of American Girls, was written in response to a book by Edward H. Clarke, a Harvard medical school professor, which remained influential two decades after its publication. Clarke had warned of the dangers of education to women’s health and well-being in Sex and Education, or A Fair Chance for the Girls, in 1873.34 In her response, Brackett shared the feminist frustrations that European-heritage feminists had been expressing since Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, insisting that “woman is not merely a ‘cradle’”: To God, the brain of a woman is as precious as the ovary and uterus, and as he did not make it impossible for her to think clearly when the uterus is in a congested state, . . . no more did he design that the uterus should not be capable of healthy and normal action while the brain is occupied with a regular amount of exercise.35 So then, although women’s reproductive capacity may have been ordained by God, their intellectual ability was also part of his design; the two need not mutually exclude each other. Furthermore, women’s physical difference from men does not negate their ability to be rational agents in the world. Again, in



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today’s terms Brackett proves herself to be a liberal feminist by clearly stating that women’s reproductive function does not and was not meant to define them as persons. The debate about female physiology and the accompanying need to protect women’s health points to another matter that Brackett addresses: women’s control over their own health and well-being. Even if women’s health is put in jeopardy by increased activity in the public sphere (a claim that Brackett rejects), the solution to the problem should be determined by women, not men. By contemporary feminist standards, her stance on this issue is quite tame. Yet decades before women’s health activists like Margaret Sanger began their work, Brackett defined women’s health as a gender issue. She notes that while men generally agree with Dr. Clarke’s claims, women condemn them. Her conclusion is: “This is a woman’s question [and] women themselves are the only persons capable of dealing with it.”36 Brackett joined more progressive European-heritage feminists in this era by addressing sex education. She urged mothers “to speak earnestly, fully, and plainly to the girl of the mysterious process of reproduction,”37 because sex education is the “ground where, more than any other, body and soul, matter and spirit, touch each other.”38 By pointing to the intersection of mind with body in this way, Brackett hoped to prevent the neglect of the first and the denigration of the second. Once mothers accept their daughters’ sex education as part of their maternal duty, girls will be fully educated, and thus show “less prudery and more real modesty.”39 Yet modesty (which for Brackett is more like self-possession and self-respect than shyness about one’s sexuality) is an important character trait that all girls should develop. In fact, she speaks of the dangers that await girls who lack a sense of self-possession and confidence in themselves. One example in particular is the damage that results when young women are too devoted to an older man. On first reading Brackett seems to be little more than the typical repressive Victorian, fearful of anything that hints at sexual attraction. Yet a closer look shows that she is both critiquing feminine naivete and

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condemning sexually manipulative men, addressing what today is considered sexual harassment. There are many men in middle life against whose character no whisper has ever dared to raise itself, men of culture and power, men of strong personal “magnetism” . . . who often attract the most idolatrous admiration of young girls and young women. They may do this at first unconsciously; but they are pleased by it finally, and seem to enjoy being surrounded, as it were, by a circle of young incense-bearers.40 The fellows who attract such an entourage may see no harm in it, and the casual observer may agree. But for Brackett, this sort of interaction with women too young to determine their own path, yet too old to be satisfied with girlish occupations, results in real damage to the admirer. Brackett’s language is quaint, but the reality she expresses is a contemporary one. Young women’s spirit is only “half-conscious and just awakening” in this time of life; they are vulnerable and full of a longing that they do not understand. Brackett recognizes that it is normal for people in this stage of life to admire older, more accomplished adults. But if a young woman is unable to exercise the selfpossession that Brackett so highly values, the adored older man’s influence can reduce her to “a most unnatural and morbid state.”41 What Brackett addresses here (albeit in overly polite Victorian terms) is emotional manipulation at best, sexual coercion at worst. After all, she does not say that the man’s character is good, only that no one has dared to question it. In addition, today’s feminists have a whole host of terms and concepts to call on that Brackett was not at liberty to invoke. She describes a man with a sort of “magnetism” who simply is not aware of his own seductive power. Today’s feminists might see him as a man quite aware of his power and even more willing to exploit it. Brackett describes the young women as being spontaneously and voluntarily drawn to such a man. Contemporary feminists might see women who are unable to do anything other than “volunteer” to submit to his advances. Ultimately, Brackett believed that young and inexperienced women



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lacked full moral agency, and therefore men had a responsibility to defuse the situation. A truly respectable man would “by the force of loyalty to the simple Right, persistently and quietly . . . and effectually repel, all such tribute.” The man who does not decline the attentions of young women, on the other hand, “is responsible for much harm, and must answer for much unhappiness.”42 But, again, ultimately the solution lies in education. First, mothers must be fully available to their daughters to discuss sexuality. If a girl “can go fearlessly to her mother with all her thoughts and fancies, foolish though they be . . . she is as safe, . . . as if fenced about with triple walls of steel.”43 It is refreshing to note that Brackett seems to have carried out precisely this policy with her own daughters. While Hope was boarding with Eliza Sunderland’s family as a student in Ann Arbor, Brackett made it clear that she was “not ignorant about the birth of children,” because she had all of her questions answered “from a very young age” and “without hesitation.”44 Like women philosopher-educators throughout North America in this era, Brackett saw “education as the ideal means toward the eradication of women’s oppression.”45 In her view, everything—from the earliest recognition of objects in infancy to the most complex of human relationships in adulthood—education is key. For women, the acquisition of knowledge has added import: It both frees individual women from their social constraints and brings women together in common cause: “One result is marked; from all sections of the country, women heretofore knowing each other only by reputation, or not at all, are being bound together by a common interest in a sense never before known.”46 It is troubling that, although she stressed the need for unity among women, Brackett neglected issues that affected women of color. The feminist solidarity theme ran throughout her career on both the practical and theoretical levels. In her normal school work and theory, as a member of the National Education Association, as a suffrage advocate, and as a writer, Brackett continually worked to heighten women’s professional status, to impress upon women the importance of seeking goals of their own, and to encourage women to support one another. It is to her credit that on at least one occasion, she also recognized low-income

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women’s needs—though, again, she may have had only white women in mind. She charged that a boarding house for young working women failed because of all the restrictions imposed on its residents—no communication with men; no sewing machines or furnishings; no flowers, pictures, or ornaments in their rooms. “Miss Brackett eloquently states . . . that the project failed, ‘because the working women of NY are real, whole-souled women, and not machines; because they are conscious of right intentions and honest work; because they like pets and flowers and . . . because they are not one-sided, perverted beings vowed to celibacy, but whole-hearted, real women.’ ”47 Unfortunately, however, a parallel recognition of the need to recognize the full personhood of women of color is sorely missing from Brackett’s published work.

Grace C. Bibb Grace C. Bibb (1842–1912) was born into a middle-class white family and raised in the midwestern United States. After her father’s death in 1859, she began teaching alongside her mother in the public schools in Peoria, Illinois, and had become an elementary school principal by age 20. In the late 1860s, she taught in the Chicago public schools before arriving in St. Louis in 1872 or 1873, where she served as assistant principal of the normal school after Anna Brackett and Ida Eliot had relocated to New York. She joined the Philosophical Society in St. Louis, studying Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic in one of the circle’s many study groups. She was also familiar with the work of Hegel’s disciple, Rosenkranz, and studied Rousseau independently. By 1879, Bibb was recognized as an educational leader and was hired as dean of the normal school at the University of Missouri, serving for five years. She maintained ties with other members of the St. Louis circle, even after her departure, among them Harris, Davidson, Brackett, Blow, and Soldan. Bibb was the first woman to serve as dean of the normal school at the University of Missouri, and seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the work,



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reporting to Harris, “My work here proves thus far quite as pleasant as I could have hoped. . . . The president has very kindly assisted me in bringing the Department into order—entirely at my own request, but says he regards each Professor as supreme within his own department.”48 Yet in 1882 she married and moved with her husband to Omaha, Nebraska, setting career interests aside, as was common practice for women in her day.49 Life as a wife and mother did not seem to fulfill her, however. With an infant at home, she wrote to William Torrey Harris, “So much indeed do I miss [working] that I think, were exactly the right position offered, I should take it, even though it involved absence from home part of the year.”50 During this time, she turned to reading and writing about Rousseau, whose treatise on education, Emile, she had taught while at the University of Missouri. She had plans to publish a book about Rousseau for the International Education Series, edited by William Torrey Harris, who by this time had become the US commissioner of education. But Harris disapproved of Rousseau’s educational theory, so the plan never materialized.51 In the mid-1890s, Bibb returned to work as principal of the teachers’ training school in Omaha. By 1900, she was a high school teacher in Omaha where she remained until the year before her death in 1911. Bibb was a frequent contributor to The Journal of Education in St. Louis, writing articles on normal school education, which echo many of Anna Brackett’s views. She also wrote for The Western Review—primarily literary analyses, one of which was “Lady Macbeth: A Study in Character.” That essay and an article in St. Louis’s Journal of Education, “Women as Teachers,” express her feminist views.

Feminist Writings: On Lady Macbeth Bibb’s essay on Lady Macbeth at first appears to be a “maternal” feminist defense of her character. Recognizing that previous scholars have charged Lady Macbeth with being ambitious for power, Bibb excuses this character flaw as one that is simply an outgrowth of her feminine qualities. Bibb claims

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that “personal ambition is not by any means . . . a characteristic of women,”52 because women are reticent to pursue their own interests. Lady Macbeth’s aspirations are not for herself as much as they are for her husband; hers is a type of ambition, but one that is feminine in nature in that it is “in large measure unselfish.”53 So it would seem that Bibb believes Lady Macbeth has been misunderstood in part because a male standard of behavior has been applied. She is to be judged for her evil acts, certainly, but differently than she would be judged if she were a man, because her motive is a peculiarly feminine motive. Lady Macbeth, Bibb notes, had aspirations for her husband in part because she could not have them for herself: “A separate royalty would have been as impossible in aspiration, as [in] reality.”54 Even though, as the granddaughter of the king, Lady Macbeth had as much claim to the throne as did Duncan, this “diadem [was] always just beyond grasping,” simply because she was female.55 Even worse, the wrong she felt was allowed to ferment because, as a woman, she had nothing to divert her mind “from its contemplation by active duties of any wide range.”56 Finally, Lady Macbeth had no female friendships to rely on; she was a woman of a “strong nature [who] suffers in silence,”57 isolated and alone in a world ruled by men over whom she could exercise no power with the exception, of course, of her husband. Yet despite the constraints placed on her because of her gender, Lady Macbeth rebelled against her plight and thus made a departure “from the governing influences of her sex” in a manner that is decidedly masculine.58 Women’s crimes, Bibb claims, most often grow out of an emotional response— passion, jealousy, or revenge—to a concrete experience of wrong. Yet Lady Macbeth “resolves upon assassination as the most direct means to an end, calmly, deliberately, with no personal wrongs to avenge.”59 Bibb implies that this evidence of her determination is almost to be admired, particularly in contrast to her husband’s lack of will. At the same time, her accompanying “subordination of the individual,” namely herself, “to the family” via her attempt to aid in her husband’s advancement “lends a color of womanliness to her association with the crime,” in Bibb’s view.60



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Bibb’s Macbeth article in The Western Review was followed in a later issue that same year by Denton Snider—a male colleague in the St. Louis circle who was admired as a Shakespeare scholar. He offers a much more orthodox interpretation of the evils Lady Macbeth committed: The somewhat prevalent notion of making love the mainspring of Lady Macbeth’s actions and of seeing in her the tender, devoted wife who committed the most horrible crimes merely out of affection for her husband is ridiculous and is, in my judgment, contradicted by the whole tenor of the play. . . . To be wife is clearly not her highest ambition, that she is already; but it is to be the queen.61 It is not necessary in this discussion to argue Snider’s point versus Bibb’s. But it is important to note that Bibb’s argument was more subtle—and not surprisingly, more feminist—than Snider recognized. While she claimed that Lady Macbeth acted out of love, she did not identify it as the “tender devotion” Snider implies. Bibb’s argument was that Lady Macbeth’s actions were due in large part to her derivative status. She was a wife and saw herself as such, but she could never be queen unless Macbeth was king. Bound to an understanding of herself as one with her husband, then, Lady Macbeth was driven to urge him to seek what he himself shrank from attaining. Despite Snider’s harsh criticism of Bibb’s perspective, she was not discouraged from doing more work in literary analysis. This was the second of five essays she wrote in the short-lived Western Review. As the others are neither feminist nor philosophical, however, they are not discussed here.

Feminist Writings: On Women as Teachers Bibb’s “Women as Teachers” provides traces of St. Louis idealism while being unquestionably feminist. In it, she maintains that education is in part a replication of the human experience within each individual. The challenge the teacher faces is to “excite dormant powers, to furnish avenues for the roused

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activities, and to guide these activities into the channels presented.”62 Like Brackett, Bibb sees education as a process of awaking the human mind to the truths that it is in its nature to discover. “All true education is subjective,” Bibb declares, “the power [to learn] is within the mind of the pupil.”63 These two glimpses of American idealism’s educational doctrines along with her affinity for Brackett’s feminism are worth noting. Bibb also recognizes that “an essential element of the teacher’s character” is sympathy,64 and in her view this is a stereotypically feminine character trait. Yet sympathy does not amount merely to emotional connection with another nor to compassion toward them. For Bibb, broadly defined, sympathy includes the ability to transcend one’s own experience and enter into a relationship of understanding with another. In this sense, her ideas align with those of a later idealist in the United States, Marietta Kies, who discussed not sympathy per se, but “grace” as related to altruistic impulses. Bibb’s view is that “the truly educative mind possesses a peculiar power of placing itself inside the circle of another’s consciousness” in order to instruct the student.65 Many of the greatest educators—Pestalozzi, Arnold, and Mann, for example—possessed a sympathy of this sort, and for this reason were able to break down the barriers that often exist between teacher and student, which in Bibb’s view is really a barrier between mind and mind. Given women’s tendency to be better schooled in exercising sympathy, they are more likely to be able to meet “the sympathetic needs of the child,” particularly in the primary grades.66 Like Brackett, Bibb insists that women are equally capable of teaching at the higher levels and of assuming leadership in education. In her view, women have the same degree of competency for high school teaching as men do, and their teaching methods are just as philosophical. Yet young women are often held back by their parents’ hesitance to provide them with a solid education. Since girls and young women are not properly schooled, even the brightest among them produce few original thoughts. Instead, they engage in “idle re-discovery and valueless re-statement,” because few even “know . . . where originality is no longer possible.”67 Even so, some women overcome a great number of obstacles, continue to grow intellectually, and thus are able to do



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their work in the schools well—not merely “as well as a man, for there are many men . . . whose work would be a poor criterion for that of any woman of ability—but absolutely well.”68 Yet women who transcend the obstacles before them find themselves beset with constant fault-finding and charges that they are “too set in their ways.”69 This is particularly true for the few women who attain leadership positions. Bibb considers such criticism unjust and points to a number of female educational administrators who have carried out their work with the greatest of success. In doing so, she invokes the name of the venerable Ralph Waldo Emerson who praised the St. Louis schools where women held both teaching and leadership positions.70 More important to this discussion, however, is that Bibb refers to the St. Louis normal school “whose plan and organization have been the work of a woman”71—namely Anna C. Brackett—and which produced an army of young women, . . . who have carried into their work an exactness, a knowledge of the limits of methods, as well as of their use, a love of truth, an enthusiasm, to which we stand today deeply indebted and upon which we may rely as a material guarantee of future prosperity. (emphasis in original)72 In Bibb’s view, Brackett and others like her provide proof that women are competent to be administrators as well as teachers. The same could have been said of a number of other women—African-heritage and Latina women, like those discussed in this chapter, among them. Like Brackett, Grace Bibb failed to consider women’s issues across race and culture, but there were certainly women outside of the dominant culture who were doing work at this time that ran parallel to that of Brackett and Bibb. Unfortunately, however, there is no indication of interaction across cultures by Brackett, Bibb, or others in their group of European-heritage educator/theorists. To say it is disappointing that group of white liberal feminists did their best to ignore issues related to race and social justice is a profound understatement. Worse still, Brackett addressed race in her many writings only twice: once to promote negative and condescending stereotypes of Native American and African American students;

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another to wax sentimental about the short time she spent in Charleston, South Carolina, just prior to the Civil War. She had gone to the South, not to work in Freedmen’s Schools, as did many of her contemporaries of both European and African heritage. Instead, she went to Charleston simply to establish a normal school for young white women without critically examining the racial oppression that flourished all around her.73 Bibb was absolutely silent about race, class, and culture. Although each had strong commitments to education as an empowering and liberating force for women, they never examined those commitments in relation to race, culture, or socioeconomic class. A number of women of color shared their concerns, however, and we can recognize them today for their contributions to this discussion.

Fanny Jackson Coppin Fanny Jackson Coppin (1837–1913) was one of the first women of African heritage to be trained in normal school pedagogy and become principal of a secondary school in the United States. Catalogues of the schools she attended demonstrate that, like Brackett and Bibb, she studied the educational theories of Pestalozzi and Froebel. She also became familiar with the work of Goethe and quite possibly other German romantic or idealist thinkers while living and working among the intellectual elite in Newport, Rhode Island, as a teenager. As a student at Oberlin, she studied ancient Greek, Latin, and Christian literature and thought, teaching courses in these areas once she became an educator. Coppin wrote just one book, Reminiscences and Hints on Teaching, and opened it with a dedication: this book is inscribed to my beloved aunt sarah orr clark who, working at six dollars a month saved one hundred and twenty-five dollars and bought my freedom



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Born in Washington, D.C. just over a quarter century before the Emancipation Proclamation, Coppin joined her aunt in New England after gaining her freedom. She was between ten and twelve years old at the time. She first lived with family in New Bedford, Massachusetts, then moved to live with another aunt in Newport, Rhode Island. By the age of fourteen, she felt the need to earn her own living, so began working as a domestic servant for a wealthy couple in Newport—George Henry and Elizabeth (Steuart) Calvert. Toward the end of her life, Coppin remembered the Calverts fondly, believing that as a childless couple they treated her more like a daughter than a servant. She was given time to study for an hour every other day during the week, used the money she earned to pay for French lessons, attended Newport’s public “colored” school for a time, and spent hours with Elizabeth Calvert, learning the arts of sewing and needlework by her side and accompanying her on trips to the ocean. When she sneaked off for piano lessons without permission during work hours, Mrs. Calvert did not scold or punish her, but simply said, “Well Fanny, . . . if you had asked me, you might have had the piano here.” In short, Coppin felt a strong affection for Elizabeth, saying quite plainly, “I loved her and she loved me.” She also conveyed a sense of respect and admiration for George Henry Calvert, whom she described as a true gentleman and accomplished writer.74 Yet, Fanny’s relationship with the Calverts may have been more complex than her reminiscences, roughly fifty years later, would suggest. Both members of this couple were from politically powerful slaveholding families in Maryland.75 Although they were unionists during the Civil War, there is no evidence George Henry or Elizabeth formally renounced their families’ legacy as slaveholders. Yet neither did they fully embrace it. After the death of his father in 1838, George Henry was content with a monetary inheritance, leaving the family’s plantation and its many slaves to his younger brother, Charles.76 A few years later, George Henry and Elizabeth relocated to Newport, Rhode Island—just after the state’s full abolition of slavery in 1842.77 George Henry served as Newport’s mayor for a short time and was a member of its school board.78

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Despite distancing himself geographically from his slaveholding roots, however, Calvert maintained racist views. He fully accepted pseudoscientific claims about white superiority that held currency at the time, asserting in one book that skin color is “not a mere superficial mark, but denotes deep differences, being an index of mental capacity.” It was simply natural, he thought, for whites not only to subdue, but to enslave or exterminate people of color.79 Yet in another book, The Gentleman, which was widely read during the Civil War and accepted as an allegory for the conflict, Calvert insisted that gentlemanliness does not correlate with social position or economic class, but rather is a quality of a person’s character. He cites examples of generosity and altruism by prominent literary and historical figures, then toward the end of the work adds: “The gentleman is above all things free. A slave, therefore, he must not be—to things, anymore than to persons. . . . He is first of all a man, and to be a man, he must be a freeman, above voluntary subservience.”80 This statement was among those seized upon by unionists and abolitionists who put their own “spin” on the work: “Preposterous and exclusive claims [have been] arrogantly put forth by a little community [i.e., the South] in justification of profane and destructive violence to a nation’s welfare,” wrote one northern reviewer. Thankfully, he continued, Calvert “provided a clear and emphatic exposition of the Gentleman as an incarnation of justice, love, and honor,” and concluded: “No ethical or aesthetical treatise could be more seasonable than this.”81 Meanwhile, southerners and Confederates clung to passages in the book that waxed sentimental about hospitality, gentility, and refinement—of which there were many. Allegory, no doubt, is a very imprecise form of argument and is open to interpretation. In any case, this is where Coppin lived as a teenager: in the household of George Henry Calvert, who, like so many white southern apologists, was either unwilling or unable to recognize the deep injustices of racism—on every level of human experience. Yet, late in her life, she reflected, “My life there was most happy.”82 How could this be? First of all, one of the chief benefits Coppin cited about working for the Calverts was the freedom they allowed her to study. She also recalled being “in



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contact with people of refinement and education” while living in the Calvert home. And there is no doubt that there was an intellectual atmosphere in their household. George Henry Calvert studied in Europe after completing his undergraduate work at Harvard and was in the first generation of writers in the United States to study and publish discussions of Goethe, Schiller, and other European thinkers. In fact, he had the privilege of visiting with Goethe in person while in Germany. In the 1830s, Calvert was a professor of philosophy at an early iteration of the University of Maryland.83 In Newport, he and Elizabeth frequented salon-style gatherings with Henry James, Sr., who is known to have socialized with the historian George Bancroft; the newspaper editor Horace Greeley; and the liberal clergymen George Ripley, Charles Brooks, and A. G. Mercer. Fanny may have met any of these eminent men, their wives, or their children—including the young William James and Henry James, Jr., who were just a few years younger than Coppin.84 It is also possible that Calvert believed in individual exceptionalism. That is, he may have been able to recognize—even celebrate—achievement by specific individuals, even though he believed in racial inferiority in the abstract. Therefore, he may have been quite willing to provide opportunities for intellectual growth and development for a talented young woman like Fanny, if only to see just how high she could soar. The idea is not as far-fetched as it may sound to the twenty-first-century ear. The educator Betsey Stockton, discussed in the previous chapter, was given access to the library while a servant to Princeton’s former president. And as we will see in Chapter 4, Elizabeth Calvert’s cousin, Margaret Mercer, funded the education of a number of her family’s former slaves. Perhaps Fanny’s study time included use of the family library—which, given George Henry’s scholarly interests, would likely have been fairly extensive. Elizabeth Calvert was willing to provide access to a piano. Why not books as well? If so, Fanny would have been leagues ahead of many young women intellectually in her day. In addition, Calvert’s racism would have been neither new nor surprising to Coppin. She was born into servitude and maintained ties with older relatives

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who had endured the degradations of slavery for much of their lives. She’d have known through experience and been cautioned by loved ones about the racist views and attitudes she would encounter throughout her lifetime. Interestingly, in Reminiscences, she makes note of a “gentleman” who visited the Institute for Colored Youth when she was its principal. He had nearly completed a manuscript to advance his theories of white supremacy. But Coppin was proud to report that he seemed to abandon the project after seeing the high levels of student achievement at the school. She was too polite, of course, to disclose the name of this gentleman; it may not have been George Henry Calvert, but it certainly fits his profile.85 As an individual and as an educator, Fanny Jackson Coppin was not naive. She knew and understood racism in its many manifestations. She also believed that education was a powerful liberating force, however, and knew how important it was to demonstrate this to leaders in the dominant culture. Finally, even if Coppin did not have full access to the intellectual goods she encountered at the Calvert home, a person with her passion for learning would not be held back. As she noted herself, she yearned “to get an education and to teach my people. This idea was deep in my soul. Where it came from, I cannot tell.”86 Toward the end of six years with the Calverts, she prepared for admission to Rhode Island’s state normal school. Though Elizabeth Calvert tried to entice her to stay—“Fanny, will money keep you?”—she enrolled in the fall of 1857, the only student of African descent at the school. After completing the course of study there, she was accepted into Oberlin College. Interestingly, she notes that an aunt helped her advance her education. But it appears that the Calverts, descendants of colonial powerbrokers and heirs to a fortune who she believed treated her like a daughter, did not. Even so, she was ready to launch a career in education. Oberlin was founded by socially progressive evangelical Christians in 1833 and opened its doors as a coeducational institution. Two years later, it began admitting African American students, the first white institution to do so. Entering the college in 1860, Coppin would have studied alongside the



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self-appointed historian of the St. Louis idealist circle, Denton Snider, though neither of them noted this in their writings. She also followed Mary Patterson at Oberlin, who later taught with her in Philadelphia, and was followed by Mary Church Terrell, Haydee Campbell, and scores of others who became influential African American educators and activists. Coppin took the classical course, which was generally considered the realm of male students, though all courses of study were open to both men and women at Oberlin. As she advanced in her studies, she won a number of accolades. Her achievements were such that she was selected to teach the classics to first- and second-year Oberlin students while she was still a student herself. Even among the progressives who populated this campus, it was unprecedented for a person of African descent to be in a position of authority over European-heritage students, but the experiment worked. Soon, Coppin’s class overflowed and was split into two sections. Another instructor was hired to teach the additional students when it overflowed again. Coppin’s life experiences impelled her not only to seek every educational opportunity available but also to expand academic options for others, particularly people of African descent. So in her last year at Oberlin, it seemed only natural to establish an evening school program for the influx of people of color into Ohio, a free border state, during the US Civil War. She recalled the fulfillment this work brought her: It was deeply touching to me to see old men painfully following the simple words of spelling; so intensely eager to learn. I felt that for such people to have been kept in the darkness of ignorance was an unpardonable sin, and I rejoiced that even then I could enter measurably upon the course in life which I had long ago chosen.87 Coppin undertook this work decades before the movement to establish evening schools for working people was underway. A study of her work in relation to other adult education programs across races and cultures would be extremely valuable and may demonstrate that she was truly ahead of her time in this arena.

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After graduating from Oberlin, Coppin accepted a position at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (now Cheyney University), where she taught for four years before rising to the rank of principal. This makes her one of the first African American women to assume leadership over an entire school—in this case, one that offered kindergarten programs, elementary education, and secondary education. She held this position for nearly forty years. Under her leadership, the institute established a normal school as well. Coppin’s essays on teaching in her Reminiscences were written many years after her success as a school principal in Philadelphia. In this collection, she reports on the arc of her career as an educator. She also provides an overview of her work with her husband on a mission trip to Africa. And while she does not spend as much time as we might like reflecting on the theories that informed her work, we can and should examine her pedagogical methods and strategies today. Just as bell hooks brought the feminist/womanist ideas of Sojourner Truth to light, it will be valuable to recognize and examine the educational ideals and critical race theories implicit in Coppin’s discussion. She not only transcended the many barriers to success that African Americans faced during her lifetime, but also succeeded in laying a firm foundation for the education for women and men of color.

“Hints” on Teaching In naming her only published book Reminiscences and Hints on Teaching Coppin belies a tendency to underplay her achievements—a common malady among women in this era. Coppin presented her theories as merely “hints.” Yet, the ideas she outlined in this work are well-considered insights into the process of teaching and learning, gained through careful study and dedicated practice. This relatively brief work lays out the pedagogical methods that reflect Coppin’s use of the most advanced educational practices in her day.



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Coppin urged for as much hands-on learning as possible in order to engage students on the level of experience. She suggests playful teaching techniques for young children—placing alphabet cutouts in a box and allowing students to take turns finding a specific letter, for instance, or setting up an imaginary store to exchange goods and count play money. She was also a champion of interdisciplinary project-based learning. She sketches several lessons in geography designed to engage students, such as constructing a map— measuring distances, combining appropriate materials, determining color schemes—to help students explore towns, cities, regions, and nations and see their relationships to each other. But what is more novel about Coppin’s pedagogy is its emphasis on collaboration. Unlike Brackett and other contemporaries whose theory focused almost exclusively on teacher-directed pedagogy, Coppin enlisted students in cooperative teaching-learning activities. Although not employing today’s terminology, she guided students in hands-on review of written work and oral reports. At times these were teacher-student sessions in which she reviewed written work with individual students to guide and support them in self-correction. At other times, she set up student-led coaching sessions, with pupils at varying levels of skill producing work on the chalkboard while small groups of students worked with them to correct and revise the work. Finally, she implemented a mentoring program, assigning high-achieving students increasing levels of responsibility in the classroom as an assistant to a seasoned teacher at the institute. Use of the mentoring model for teacher training was common in Coppin’s day, due partly to tradition, partly to necessity. There is a long and rich disciplementor tradition within many of the professions, after all: student-teacher, novice-cleric, assistant-physician, clerk-lawyer. For generations of teachers and students, it only seemed natural for a star pupil to become the successor to the mentor under whom they studied. In addition, with formalized education becoming the norm in the mid-/late nineteenth century, there was a great demand for skilled teachers. In small communities throughout North America

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in this period, it was not uncommon for a bookish young adult to begin teaching in a local school at the tender age of fourteen or fifteen. These young, untrained aspiring teachers simply drew on whatever knowledge they had to provide instruction and whatever methods they could muster to impose order. Professional educators like Anna Brackett were so concerned with the ad hoc approach many communities took toward teacher training that their words of caution—let students finish the normal school course—nearly became their mantra. Finally, model classrooms for teacher training was a standard feature of normal schools, with lead teachers supervising teachers-in-training as they provided instruction to students—the predecessor to today’s student teaching programs in colleges of education throughout North America. In this sense, Coppin’s mentoring system was not among the more innovative of her pedagogical methods. Yet in her historical context, it was immeasurably valuable. Within communities of color, there were precious few opportunities to get top-quality teacher training. Educational institutions established for and by people of European heritage were often completely closed to students outside the dominant culture. This was certainly true in most southern states in the United States and all too common in its northern states as well. In institutions that admitted nonwhites, people of color had to face everything from a hostile white superiority complex to condescension to naive racism to pity. It was common for academic administrators to look on impotently while race-biased students refused to live with or study alongside students of color. Add to this the fact that parents in communities of color often felt a deep need to ensure that their children see educators from their own racial/cultural group in the classroom. Parents outside the dominant culture objected to the ways in which many European-heritage teachers carried the same hostility, condescension, or pity into their schools that they were subjected to in society at large. These factors combined to create even more of a demand for welltrained African-heritage educators using Coppin’s mentorship model. At the institute, African-heritage educators empowered members of their community to engage in scholarship and professional achievement. When Coppin formally



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established a normal school program at the institute, it was one of the first at a historically black college.

Cultural Insights in Africa While Coppin devoted the majority of her career to providing educational opportunity and excellence to people of color in the United States, she was also aware of gender bias and the limits placed on women regarding both educational and professional advancement. After 1900 her life and career focus changed dramatically, when her husband became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal church, and she turned her attention to women’s issues and education as a missionary in Africa. Arriving in South Africa in 1902, Coppin joined her husband in Cape Town, where he had already established the Bethel Institute—a church and school combined.88 The couple lived near Cape Town during the majority of their time as missionaries, but they also spent time in Cape Elizabeth; Batusoland, in current-day Lesotho; Bulawayo, in current-day Zimbabwe; and Mafeking, near today’s border of South Africa and Botswana—traversing a total of roughly 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) during their stay, which lasted nearly ten years. Although Coppin carried a sense of cultural and religious superiority into her missionary work, she also recognized how much damage colonialism had done in the region. Housing for both the “native” African population in Cape Town and the “colored”—or mixed-race—population was far inferior to both the dwellings of the colonial Dutch population and the traditional homes Coppin visited in rural villages. Africans who lived in the countryside farther away from the city made humble, but more humane, homes for themselves. In addition, Coppin saw high rates of alcohol abuse in the city and near Dutchowned plantations—a social ill she considered to be a direct outgrowth of colonial exploitation. Colonizers often employed “colored” workers on large tracts of farmland. With vineyards being common in the area, Coppin informed

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her readers that often these workers were paid in part with “the poorest brands of wine,” which facilitated use and abuse of the substance. In addition, the local “native” African population worked primarily in the shipping industry in Cape Town where “saloons were plentiful.” In many sections of the city, there was a saloon “on every corner of street after street, and occasionally one between.” For workers both in the city and on surrounding farms, Coppin concluded: “It surely cannot be difficult to imagine how easily a people so neglected . . . would turn to the drink habit as a mere pastime.”89 Coppin’s observations prompted her to take on a special assignment in the region: enlisting women as temperance workers to help eradicate alcohol abuse and the social ills that came with it. As a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Coppin saw this organization as a powerful force in social reform, in the United States, England, and its territories. Why shouldn’t she introduce a new chapter in Africa? Today we may see the temperance movement as a quaint, moralistic, and misguided reform effort that led to the disastrous Prohibition era in the United States in the 1920s. Yet, in its day it was a progressive movement, facing head-on issues that previously had been considered “private matters” not to be discussed in the public sphere. Women in the WCTU and affiliated organizations began talking for the first time about alcohol abuse as related to domestic violence, sexual violence, adultery, and desertion—albeit largely under a cloak of Victorian propriety. From a feminist perspective, the most laudable aspect of temperance activism was its connection to the women’s rights movement. Many temperance activists linked their discussions to a demand for women’s access to legal and political rights, so they could enter the public sphere and take action on these issues. As we will see in Chapter 5, however, WCTU failed to speak out about racist violence in the US. Coppin established the Cape Colony Branch of the WCTU in South Africa and held the organization’s first conference in Port Elizabeth, a city along the southern coastline of the country, nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Cape Town. At this meeting, a number of women were empowered to assume leadership roles for the first time in their lives. Coppin does not detail their discussions at the meeting or name the women who participated. Yet she does



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note that many of the group’s new members had never before spoken in a public forum, let alone address women’s issues. As was typical of WCTU groups, Coppin’s collective of women not only shared their concerns about alcohol abuse but also came up with strategies for addressing the problem. Since the majority of women in this new international branch of the WCTU were already Christians, they believed the best ways to address alcohol abuse and other social ills were to win converts and ban alcohol from their communities. In her work with women in Africa, as well as with the local populations overall, Coppin demonstrated respect for a wide range of local languages, cultures, and religions in the region—both “native” (African) and “colored” (mixed-race) people, whether they spoke local languages, Dutch, or English. She also valued some of the traditional practices that were under threat due to colonial rule—recognizing, for instance, that the conditions in which the so-called heathen people lived were often superior to their crowded environs in the city, where they were susceptible to infectious diseases.90 Learning more about the culture and values of the local Basuto people than white colonizers had learned at this point in history, Coppin made an observation that, though interlaced with a sense of the superiority of Christianity, expresses more cultural sensitivity than we see in many thinkers in this era: I have never found [the Basuto people] entirely satisfied with mere abstract teaching of religion. They have religious views before we reach them. Crude, of course; unenlightened, uncertain, speculative, false—just as all people who have not been given the true word of God. When those who come to them win their confidence, they readily modify their religious views. . . . [Then] with an incredible clearness of vision, they look forward to and expect some practical and really tangible benefits to grow out of their new relation. They already have, as it were, an intuitive sense of right and wrong, hence they do no harm to the stranger in their midst. Indeed, our religious teaching is, in a sense, but an explanation of their own religious impulses.91 The main goal of Coppin’s trip would have been to win converts to Christianity, as was the aim of all Western missionaries in Africa and Asia in

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this historical period. Yet, Coppin’s account of her experiences as a missionary barely mentions this aspect of her work. Instead, she painted a sketch of her temperance activism with African and mixed-race women—not for the number of converts it yielded, but for the value it brought to women’s lives and the promise it held for their community’s future. She also shared these insights about cooperation across faiths and cultures, prompted by the comments of a Muslim leader, Hadje Ben Hassen, at a conference in Mafeking: In his address, he said that it was not customary for Christians and Mohammedans to thus come together, but as there was a Negro Bishop [Coppin’s husband] in their midst, he felt that [religion] should be set aside and that all should come out to do honor to a distinguished member of the race. . . . Perhaps one of the things that has caused Mohammedans to step over the religious barriers that have kept the dark races apart in Africa is the fact that, when the lines of proscription are drawn, . . . the coloured are all treated alike.92 Again, from today’s perspective, some aspects of Coppin’s work in southeastern Africa are problematic. She carried with her a sense of cultural and religious superiority and believed Western traditions and values should be imported to Africa. She also saw Christianity as the one true religion and thus was committed to winning converts and establishing churches in her temporary home. At the same time, she exhibited a higher level of cultural sensitivity than many of her contemporaries, which I would credit to her experiences as a woman and a minority who recognized the damage done when cultural differences were ignored or suppressed.

Women and Culture/Difference in Canada Beginning with the middle decades of the nineteenth century, there was a good deal of educational and cultural border crossing in the northern United States and Canada. This was prompted in part by greater levels of freedom



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for people of African descent in this part of the continent, along with more employment opportunities for Euro-heritage women. Although colleges and universities were often open to only males, in both countries the existence of normal schools opened up a world of higher education for women in this era. Many of these schools in the northern United States and in Canada had race-blind admissions policies, which allowed women (and men) outside the dominant culture to enroll. Normal school education provided women with a means to earn a living and maintain independence, of course. But it also opened up an arena in which they could thrive professionally, as they gained mastery over teaching methods and pedagogical theories and developed their own philosophies of education. This is particularly true in the United States, where by the early 1870s the vast majority of teachers were women. In Canada, the pace of women’s advancement was slower, but by the late 1870s, close to half of all teachers were female. In Mexico, women began to achieve parity with male educators by the late 1890s.93 The ebb and flow of opportunities for women educators contributed to a fair amount of border crossing in this period.94 Access to normal school education in Canada was an especially valuable commodity for women of African descent before the US Civil War. Intellectually minded women could find refuge from discrimination and abuse against people of color, whether slave or free, particularly in the communities between the Michigan border and Toronto. Two of these women were members of the prestigious Shadd family of Delaware, who moved first to Pennsylvania and then to Ontario as racist policies intensified in the United States in the 1850s. Having been denied adequate education before arriving in Canada, this large family united to establish schools and/or serve as teachers in communities like Raleigh, Windsor, Sandwich, and Chatham in Ontario. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the oldest sibling, taught for several years but turned her attention to publishing an abolitionist newspaper, supporting work on the Underground Railroad, and conducting a campaign to encourage people of African heritage to emigrate to Canada. Emmaline Shadd was one of the first women of African

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descent to graduate from Toronto Normal School. She spent several years as a classroom teacher, including roughly five at a Freedmen’s School in Georgia.95 Both women contributed to the development of a rich educational and cultural life in Ontario but were more committed to practice than to theory. This is true of other women in Canada as well. Anne Quinlan (1839–1923), Onésime Dorval (1845–1932), and Elizabeth Barrett (1841–88) are among some of Canada’s first professional educators.96 Quinlan attended a normal school program in St. John, New Brunswick, in 1856, taught in local girls’ academies for a few years, then became a central figure at St. Michael’s Academy in the 1870s and 1880s. Onésime Dorval and Elizabeth Barrett have a mixed colonialist legacy, from a twenty-first-century point of view. Dorval earned a normal school certificate at the Ecole Modèle, near her home in St. Jérôme, Quebec. Barrett was a native of Orono, Ontario, who may have attended Toronto Normal School. Like Coppin, Dorval and Barrett served as missionaries, in their case among the people of Canada’s First Nations. A devout Catholic, Dorval moved west to become a missionary and educator at the Red River Settlement, near currentday Winnipeg, in 1877. She then taught for several years in Saskatchewan, most notably in the Batoche School District (1894–1914). Barrett was devoted to Methodism, so she worked at Whitefish Lake Mission in Alberta, alongside the Obijwa convert to Christianity, Rev. Henry Bird Steinhauer—whose given name, Shawahnekezhik, some have translated as “Southern Skies.” Barrett was one of the first Europeans at Whitefish Lake and was considered an effective and successful teacher. The cultural sensitivity she demonstrated is likely to have helped. She quickly discovered, for instance, that her willingness to learn the Cree language inspired her students to learn English. She accepted a second assignment at the Morley Mission with Rev. George McDougall. At some point in the 1880s, she relocated to Fort Macleod, Alberta, to open a public school, remaining there until her early death. While Barrett generated a good deal of correspondence, neither she nor these contemporaries produced any publications discussing their methods and theories. They were very accomplished women, but practitioners first and foremost.



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Normal Schools and Feminist Pedagogy in Mexico As noted in Chapter 2, German idealist pedagogical theory was introduced in Mexico by European immigrants. The Swiss-born thinker Enrique Rébsamen was instrumental in standardizing the education of teachers in the country, founding several normal schools. Two of the most well-known schools were at Nuevo Leon and Xalapa.97 Rébsamen seems to have been supportive of equal access to education and employment for women. The feminist educator Dolores Correa Zapata wrote an article about Rébsamen, which suggests that he was similar to William Torrey Harris in the United States, and Adolphus Egerton Ryerson in Canada in this way. In addition, his student Felix Ramos y Duarte served as the private tutor of feminist Rita Cetina Gutiérrez before women had equal access to higher education. Finally, at Escuela Normal de Xalapa in the state of Veracruz, Rébsamen worked with a New York–born educator, Harriet Fay, who led recent graduates on a tour of educational institutions in “the principal cities of the United States and Canada” in 1900, reportedly the first such visit by educators from a Mexican normal school. Beginning in mid-May, the group went to St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Albany, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, returning to Mexico in late June.98 A chronicle of this educational tour would allow us to explore critical points of cultural and educational exchange across the North American continent. Throughout North America, there were parallel developments in education as related to women’s issues. Mexico’s feminist movement emerged out of the shared concerns of a group of normal school educators: Rita Cetina Gutiérrez (1846–1908), Cristina Farfán (1846–1880), Gertrudis Tenorio Zavala (1843– 1925), Dolores Correa Zapata (1853–1924), and Mateana Murguía de Aveleyra (1856–1906). Each of these women established and/or contributed to women’s magazines. They also engaged in activism to secure women’s social, political, and legal rights, thus laying a foundation for the vibrant feminist movement that developed in Mexico early in the twentieth century.99

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Rita Cetina Gutiérrez, Cristina Farfán, and Gertrudis Tenorio Zavala founded a school for girls and young women in Mérida in the state of Yucatán on the Gulf of Mexico in 1870, one of the first secular institutions in the country. They named the school, as well as a literary society and a newspaper La Siempreviva, “everlasting life.” Gutiérrez was the school’s director—reportedly the first woman to serve in this role in Mexico—and Farfán and Zavala its teachers. Like so many feminists in the northern part of the continent, Gutiérrez and her colleagues were strongly opposed to traditional education for young women, which (as in the United States and Canada in this era) still focused on the domestic arts—cooking, sewing and needlework, and a smattering of art and music. So this feminist trio developed an academic curriculum that would rival the course of study at any school for boys and young men. They also provided a teacher training program. The school was such a success that by 1877, Gutiérrez was asked by Yucatán’s governor to serve as the director of the new Instituto Literario de Niñas (Literary Institute for Girls). By 1886 La Siempreviva merged with this new state-sponsored institution.100 Dolores Correa Zapata grew up in Yucatán and contributed to Cetina’s work with La Siempreviva. By the mid-1890s, she had relocated to Mexico City, teaching at the Normal School for Women there nearly fifteen years. She wrote several textbooks that were in use in her own normal school and throughout Mexico: Moral e instrucción cívica (Moral and Civic Instruction), Economía política (Political Economics), La mujer en el hogar (Woman in the Home). The last of these three works was mandatory reading in some normal schools. Yet it did not simply promote a traditional view of hearth and home, as was typical of domestic science texts. In fact, Correa used it as an opportunity to address issues like domestic violence and alcoholism as well as to applaud Europe and the United States for allowing greater social freedoms and political rights to women.101 In addition to these textbooks, Correa wrote “De la escuela primaria a la normal” (“From Primary School to Normal School”), “La obra del señor Rébsamen” (“The Work of Señor Rébsamen”), “La federación y la escuela” (“Federation and the School”), and “La guerra y la paz” (“War and Peace”).



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Maintaining connections with Cetina and her colleagues in Mérida, Correa also networked with other feminist educators in Mexico City to advance women’s rights. Like Anna Brackett, Correa responded to traditionalist, and often belittling, claims about women’s inability to achieve academically and contribute to social/political life.102 She insisted that women are moral and intellectual equals, so they deserve equal access to education, especially the sciences, which she saw as central to women’s advancement in society. She wrote “La Mujer científica” (“The Scientific Woman”) specifically to make a case for women’s education in this arena. Ultimately she succeeded, and women began to be admitted to Mexico’s elite National Preparatory School in 1883. Women’s admission into institutions of professional study followed: the Superior School of Medicine, the Superior School of Jurisprudence, and the Superior School of Commerce.103 After the turn of the century, Correa and her colleagues established the Sociedad Protectora de la Mujer (Society for the Protection of Women) to advocate for women’s rights. In doing so, they facilitated women’s continued self-advocacy as the twentieth century advanced. Feminist educational historian, Rosa Maria González Jiménez, maintains that these women laid a foundation for future feminist activism, as evidenced by Mexican women’s participation in the Feminist Congress in Baltimore (United States, 1922) and the Primer Congreso Feminista (Mexico City, 1916).104 Other Latina feminists in education who deserve mention include Salomé de Ureña (1850–97) and Ana Roqué (1853–1933). Salomé de Ureña was a Dominican who urged for women’s higher education and, in 1881, founded the Instituto de Señoritas (Institute for Young Ladies) toward that end. She was supported in this effort by her husband, the feminist-minded intellectual and future president of the country, Francisco Henríquez y Cavajal. The main focus of this institution was teacher training, and its first six graduates in 1887 became influential educators, activists, and/or theorists themselves: Mercedes Laura Aguiar Mendoza, Leonor M. Feltz, Altagracia Henríquez Perdomo, Luisa Ozema Pellerano, Catalina Pou, and Ana Josefa Puello.105 After Ureña’s early death from tuberculosis, her students assumed management of the

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school and renamed it Instituto de Salomé Ureña. Although primarily a poet, she delivered speeches on education and feminism, some of which appear in a collection along with writings by her coworker in pedagogy, Eugenio María de Hostos.106

Ana Roqué de Duprey Puerto Rican thinker Ana Roqué de Duprey (1853–1933) is more accessible to an English-reading audience, thanks to Maria del C. Garcia Padilla’s translation and discussion of her work in Women’s Philosophies of Education, a collection of biographical sketches and selections by women pedagogical theorists.107 Roqué was the daughter of a merchant in Aguadilla, on Puerto Rico’s northwestern coast. Educated at home by her grandmother, she learned to read at the age of three, but had little formal education as a child, attending school only four years between the ages of seven and thirteen. In her last year of school, she reportedly provided lessons in higher mathematics to the school’s teacher while other students were completing their writing assignments.108 It was not until the 1880s that Roqué returned to a formal educational setting, earning an undergraduate degree at the Provincial Institute where she studied philosophy and science. In 1884, she began teaching in Arecibo, then accepted an offer to serve as the director of the San Juan Normal School in 1899—on an island that was now US territory. After the turn of the century, she was instrumental in the formation of what today are the Mayagüez and San Juan campuses of the University of Puerto Rico. As was common in the nineteenth century, Roqué married young. She was just sixteen when she became a wife, and shortly thereafter a mother. Though she spent the majority of her time attending to homemaking and childcare, she maintained her passion for learning and instilled a strong sense of the value of education in her children. She practiced a homespun version of peripatetic learning while doing household tasks and urged her children to follow her



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example. Her daughter recalled that she often propped a book on the ironing board, for instance, so she could read while completing housework deep into the night.109 With this ability to multitask, she was able to contribute essays and articles to periodicals, one of very few women in Puerto Rico to do so at the time. Regarding pedagogy, Roqué was influenced by the theories of Auguste Comte, which were prominent throughout Latin America at this time. Comte’s positivism was generally considered to stand in sharp contrast to the neoHegelianism of the St. Louis idealists, but the two schools of thought shared some now-archaic ideas in common. One is a hierarchy of cultures, and in both Hegelianism and Comteanism, modernized European culture is at the top of the hierarchy; non-Western and traditional cultures are at the bottom. The other is the notion of progress. Both Hegelians and Comteans at the time held the view that everything—the natural world, ideas and concepts, and human culture and values—was in a state of advancement and ultimately on a path toward refinement, if not perfection. Hegelians, however, believed that reality is infused with and expressed through mind in a metaphysical sense. Some brands of Hegelianism see this as largely a rational mind. These are the proponents for whom the wellknown statement “the real is rational and the rational is real” holds currency. Other Hegelians see mind as more of a manifestation of ideas and/or the ideal in a more holistic sense. For these proponents, it is more appropriate to express Hegelian understandings of reality as an organic and dynamic whole. Comteans, on the other hand, maintained that human knowledge and values are constructed through reason. Humans are the measure of all things—and it is up to us to use our reason to move the wheels of progress. At a very basic level (though most Hegelians and Comteans will insist that their ideas are far too lofty and complex to be expressed “on a basic level”), the two schools of thought agree about the world we inhabit: It is a developing Reality that is in an ongoing state of progress. They also agree about the role of humans in it—as catalyzers and drivers of that progress. They simply disagree about the means by which we should move toward that progress: by deduction—tapping

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into an understanding of the Absolute to bring unity to all of reality—or by induction—applying our powers of reason to observe the world, thus producing systems that will address natural and social problems. In Roqué’s understanding, education is essential to improving the world, in regard to both individual human experience and collective social and cultural life. The educated person gains a greater self-understanding and is able to fully participate in the larger life of society. And only an educated society can reach an advanced stage of civilization, which for Roqué is a “moral, material, and intellectual stage of culture.”110 Such a society can assess the current state of the world, examine its scientific/natural processes, and use the knowledge thus gained to direct the development of both the natural world and human society/culture, so that civilization can advance in a positive direction. In this sense, Roqué aligned herself with Herbert Spencer, of whom the St. Louis Hegelians deeply disapproved. Just as women of color faced an ongoing struggle for recognition within the dominant European culture in the United States and Canada, both Ureña and Roqué did their work under the shadow of colonial rule. Roqué expressed an acute awareness of this fact, and not only wrote about it, but engaged in activism to confront dominance, first by Spain and then by the United States. Especially under rule by the United States, Roqué and other members of the intelligentsia in the Caribbean lived with a sense of optimism at first. If independence was not a viable option, at least there was the promise of American democracy to help Puerto Rico realize its potential to be free. But two key components of Puerto Rico’s new relationship with the United States continued to frustrate liberals and progressives on the island. First, the United States seemed more interested in its own financial gain as the new colonial power, rather than economic development in and for Puerto Rico. This had always been a point of contention with Spain as its ruler, and thinkers and activists were angered to see little improvement in this regard. Second was a much deeper problem on many levels: the United States wanted to “Americanize” Puerto Rico. And one main vehicle for doing so was language



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and education. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that Puerto Rican society had developed culturally in its own distinct ways under Spanish rule, US officials saw it as their mission to restructure its forms of education and governance, and to impose English on the people as they did so. Roqué reacted strongly against the policies and practices that resulted. Ever the reformer, she wrote letters, editorials, and essays and circulated petitions—all aimed to convince the island’s new colonial rulers of the errors of their ways. Not all of the public intellectuals in Puerto Rico agreed with Roqué’s approach. Thinkers like Luisa Capetillo (discussed in Chapter  5) thought that a reform-minded approach fell short of truly revolutionary ideals, and she urged for more radical forms of activism to bring about change. Yet for Roqué, working in and through existing channels of communication was to advance society and culture.

Conclusion Each of the women discussed in this chapter embraced the ideal of education as a liberating force in society. This aspect of their work and shared ideal cannot be overemphasized. Education was a commodity withheld from women of all races/cultures and men of color from the dawn of the colonial period until well into the twentieth century. Some would argue that it continues to be withheld from “the other” through economic means throughout the Western world today. For virtually every woman who put pen to paper since Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in the fifteenth century, two claims have remained central: First, insistence on access to education as a means of liberation and second, the validity of women’s claims as women to insist on education and other public goods/rights. Therefore, the women in this chapter called for equal education and established schools and colleges for women and cultural minorities in the regions where such did not already exist. As they did so, they also developed pedagogical theories and practices that expanded opportunities for individuals who had been denied full moral agency for far too long.

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Brackett and Bibb developed a Hegel-inspired pedagogy and sought to empower women in this arena. Both women had fully imbibed a liberal brand of feminism; thus their understanding of education was inseparable from the gender egalitarianism they embraced. Coppin negotiated a world in which her opportunities were constrained by both sexism and racism. “During my entire life, I have suffered from two disadvantages,” she once said, “first, that I am a woman; second, than I am a Negro.”111 Her focus was on opening up windows of opportunity for African Americans after civil war in the United States. Given her cultural context, she expressed feminist ideals through her actions, not as theory, and provided a description of her pedagogical practices, leaving it up to her readers to interpret them. Like Brackett and Bibb, Roqué was focused on women’s access to education. Her claims are intertwined with the positivist understandings sketched earlier, feminist theory, and a liberal sense of right. We need to use our powers of reason to become truly civilized, and women need to be part of that process in her view, in part because “civilized peoples respect women.”112 On the whole, this group of women made very few maternal-sounding arguments in favor of women’s education. This is largely because all of them were egalitarian-minded thinkers who believed that categories like gender and race were social constructs that put artificial roadblocks on the path to achievement. For each of the women discussed in this chapter, education is the means by which individuals gain freedom. Padilla’s discussion of Roqué expresses this ideal especially well: Her “experience led her to believe that, through education, individuals learn to be free. [They learn] to choose ‘the most transparent, beautiful, and dignified’ road in life, and to help other human beings choose that road.”113 Ultimately, this is what Brackett, Bibb, Coppin, Cetina, Correa, and Roqué all sought to do. Their aim was to advance pedagogical ideals that would empower individuals, each from within their own cultural context.

4 Audacious Women!—Four Independent Scholars Margaret Mercer, Maria Stewart, Pauline Johnson, Ellen Mitchell

The women discussed in this chapter span the entire nineteenth century and represent more female “firsts” in that they crossed the social, racial/cultural, and political boundaries that so often constrained women’s thought. Margaret Mercer was the first woman of any race to publish a school textbook on ethics. Maria Stewart was the first woman of any race to lecture to both mixed-race and mixed-gender audiences and the first woman of African descent to publish political writings. Pauline Johnson was the first indigenous Canadian feminist social critic. Ellen Mitchell was one of the first women of any race to hold a full-time position as a philosophy professor at a coeducational university in the United States. Though each of these women worked within a specific social context of friends and colleagues who supported them and their achievements, they were essentially independent scholars without the kind of institutional support that full-time faculty enjoy in academia today. They also stood out as exceptions to the rules and standards maintained by the larger social structures around them. Mercer was a genteel southern woman who was harshly criticized by

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contemporaries when she freed the slaves she inherited. No one expected a woman in her social position to be independent, earn her own living, and assume expertise as an ethicist. But this was exactly what Mercer did, generally while attributing her decisions to divine inspiration. Similarly, Maria Stewart lectured against slavery in the early 1830s, long before the dominant culture considered it acceptable for women to deliver an address in a public venue. She also embraced the revolutionary ideals of David Walker whose well-known “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World”1 called on fellow African Americans to agitate for their rights or even to follow the example of Haiti and revolt. Writing decades later, Pauline Johnson was one of the first indigenous women to earn a living as a writer. She was best known for presenting her poetry and folklore as performance pieces, but she also wrote essays about indigenous ideals and culture. Finally, Ellen Mitchell, though nearly a generation older than Johnson, broke through barriers to higher education for women. Although she was unable to obtain a doctoral degree as a few female contemporaries in her intellectual circles had done, she became one of the first women on record to teach philosophy at coeducational institutions: fulltime at the University of Denver in the early 1890s and part-time at Syracuse University in the late 1890s.2 There is no evidence that these four women knew each other. Mercer and Stewart were contemporaries who each opposed slavery and corresponded or worked with prominent abolitionists—Mercer with Gerrit Smith, one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousins; Stewart with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. But they had profoundly different views about strategy: Mercer, a white southerner, favored gradual emancipation. To the modern reader, gradual emancipation appears to be a delay strategy aimed toward appeasement without action. Yet this was the approach that had been taken in the northeastern United States in the late eighteenth century. Most northern states had officially ended slavery by 1790, but as a result of gradual emancipation policies, forced servitude was not fully abolished in New England until the late 1840s when the last few slaves were freed in Rhode



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Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Stewart, a black northerner, called for immediate emancipation and full social and political equality for all people of African heritage in the Americas. It appears that, geographically speaking, the paths of these two women never crossed. Stewart lived no farther south than Baltimore in the late 1850s. Years earlier Mercer, whose home base was roughly seventy-five miles (120 kilometers) away in Loudon County, Virginia, had lost her battle with tuberculosis at the age of fifty-five. In the 1850s Mitchell was coming of age, and Johnson was not yet born. It is unlikely that these two women met in person, but they may have been familiar with each other by name, since both were relatively prominent within their own intellectual and cultural circles. Johnson was one of the first indigenous women to present her literary work as performance pieces, not simply to entertain, but to educate the dominant culture about indigenous experience and lifeways. She set a precedent that paved the way for women like Mary Frances Thompson, who adopted the Maori name Te-ata as a performer, and others to do similar work in the early twentieth century. Mitchell was a close friend of Julia Ward Howe and other prominent feminists and was on the list of potential speakers for the Women’s Department of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.3 She was committed to women’s rights but does not appear to have been deeply involved in feminist political activism. Similarly, Johnson adopted a generalized sense of the need for women’s independence and autonomy, but she did not seem to embrace the women’s rights movements in the United States or Canada. Unfortunately, Mitchell seems to have turned a blind eye to any and all issues related to race and culture. So the two would not have had occasion to meet on this front. Whether their paths crossed as they pursued their own distinctive and very different work is a question that remains unanswered. Although all four of these women worked independently, they shared some traits in common. First, each claimed space in a masculine intellectual or social/ political domain. This led them to take time to establish their authority as women within a specific racial/cultural context. While certainly demonstrating

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mastery of many canonical texts, Mercer did so by assuming a maternal role as an instructor of philosophy and religion. She and Stewart pointed to divine inspiration as an irresistible force that guided them in their life work. Stewart and Johnson each affirmed the experience and identity of people of color within their respective communities. They also did their best to educate whites in order (they hoped) to overcome racial/cultural divides. Stewart, Johnson, and Mitchell spoke to women’s/feminist issues within their own cultural contexts. Finally, Mercer and Mitchell each assumed expertise in philosophy as a profession, engaging in philosophical discourse primarily with/for a female audience.

Margaret Mercer Margaret Mercer (1791–1846) was a white woman born into a wealthy and influential family, whose father served as governor of Maryland when she was a child (1801–03). Like many privileged women of European heritage in her era, she was tutored at home—in this case by her father. Recognized in her day as the “Hannah More of America,”4 Mercer’s work, Popular Lectures on Ethics, or Moral Obligation, is quite likely the very first ethics textbook published in North America—by a man or a woman of any race/culture. References in the book demonstrate how well versed she was in the philosophical and literary classics of her day. She makes reference to a number of thinkers who continue to be considered important in mainstream academic philosophy today: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Edmund Burke, William Paley, and Friedrich Schlegel. She also cited many Anglo-American thinkers whose work fell from prominence after the mid-/ late nineteenth century, several women among them: Isaac Watts, James Beattie, Hannah More, Dugald Stewart, Archibald Alison, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Somerville, Thomas Brown, Anna Brownell (Murphy) Jameson, Denison Olmstead, Lydia Sigourney, and Thomas Cogswell Upham.



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Mercer was raised on a plantation that was home to nearly 100 slaves,5 but slaveholding conflicted with her deeply held religious commitments. So, after her father’s death in 1821, she arranged to free the slaves she had inherited while also paying off a good deal of the debt her father left behind.6 She also helped at least some of these individuals by funding their education or placing them in apprenticeships. She was then quickly recognized as an opponent of slavery—by people of both European and African descent in her community. This was an extremely controversial stance in a southern state, of course, and Mercer was subject to a good deal of hostility from whites as a result. Reportedly, on one occasion a man being sold to a slave trader called out as he was being driven out of town, “Ah! If Miss Mercer knew what I suffer, she would help me!” When word of the situation reached her, she attempted to follow and buy the man’s freedom—with borrowed money, since she no longer had liquid assets—but he had already been sold further south by the time she arrived.7 Yet Mercer was also an enthusiastic supporter of the colonization movement—a movement to send free blacks as well as emancipated slaves to Liberia, a newly established colony on the west coast of Africa. The plan was nearly as controversial then as it is disturbing to the modern reader now. Her reasoning was that people of African descent had been transported to North America unjustly, often as a result of being sold as the spoils of war by their rivals, and that slavery was profoundly immoral and damaging to both slave and master. It was only right to send as many of their descendants as possible “back” to Africa. In letters, Mercer expressed her earnest belief that “resettlement” in Africa would give US-born people of African descent the opportunity to establish themselves and become leaders in their rightful homeland. Toward this end, she urged many of her former slaves to venture to Liberia, paying their way so they could become teachers or establish churches there. She was especially enthusiastic about their ability to take Christianity with them to Africa and win converts among the local population. Christianizing this “lost” continent, she thought, would partially atone for the sin of slavery.8

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While only one of the people she coaxed to go to Liberia was named in her biography, records show that Mercer sponsored a total of fifteen children and young adults who made this journey in 1829. To establish their identities as full human beings, rather than simply refer to them en masse as “Mercer’s emancipated slaves,” as has been the case for nearly two centuries, I will take a moment to state their names and ages and trace the bits and pieces we know about them.9 They were members of the Carrol family—Thomas (22), Edward (19), and Mary (15); the Jennings family—Sykey (26), Dorey (17), James (14), Julian (13), Charles (9), and Peter (1); the Boston family—Abraham (20), Thomas (19), Ann (17), and Henry (12); and two single men—Henry Rollings (20) and William Taylor (exact age unknown). Matching the mortality rate for people who agreed to travel to this experimental colony, one-third of Mercer’s colonists died of illness in Liberia—at least one member of each family group—three of them within the first three years. Perhaps because of the sense of risk, some would-be colonists returned to the United States. This was the case with Henry Rollings and Thomas Boston who returned in 1837 and 1830, respectively. Several years after Thomas Boston’s departure, two of his relatives went into “decline” and passed away: Ann in 1836 and Abraham in 1838. In contrast, the youngest member of this family, Henry Boston, who was just twelve years old when he first arrived on African soil, remained there for the rest of his life. Interestingly enough, he had a descendant, also named Henry, who was born in Liberia about 1900, but resettled in the United States decades later. The younger Henry Boston worked as a mariner, traveled to the Americas, settled in Baltimore, and had become a US citizen by 1940.10 The Jennings family moved from Monrovia to Cape Palmas in Liberia in 1834, two years after the secondoldest, Dorey, died of tuberculosis. There is no additional information about them or their descendants in the new nation. Similarly, there is little information available about the Carrol family: Thomas Carrol died within a year of arriving in Monrovia. The fates of Edward and Mary are unknown. Most of the young people Mercer sponsored to Liberia were literate, because she simply defied the stringent laws in effect throughout the southern United



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States that prohibited educating people of color. Just four of the individuals she sponsored to travel to Liberia were not fully literate: Two were unable to read or write; two were not able to read but could spell. And one of these was the twelve-year-old Henry Boston who is likely to have gained literacy at one of the many mission schools in the colony as he entered his teenage years. One of Mercer’s “colonists” stood out as a very high achiever: William Taylor. He was the only one mentioned by name in Mercer’s biography and the only one who did not travel to Liberia on the ship Harriet. Though there are references to others who were trained to be teachers or missionaries in the new colony, Taylor seems to be the only one who was given the opportunity to study at an advanced level. William Taylor was a man with “superior intelligence and lofty bearing [who] attracted the attention . . . of all who observed him.”11 Recognizing his talent, Mercer used her political and social connections to arrange for him to study under a prominent white professor at the first medical college in Washington, D.C., Harvey Lindsley. Taylor was a student during the day and worked evenings as a waiter at political gatherings to cover living expenses and defray the cost of his education.12 He wrote frequently to Mercer with positive reports: “Dr. Lindsley pays me as much attention as he would any other student; he teaches me Latin for nothing, gives me a recitation daily; . . . and takes me with him to see any important operations.”13 Several other students of color were also said to have studied with Lindsley, but only Taylor completed the three-year course. After finishing his studies, he traveled to Liberia to practice medicine and continued to correspond with Mercer. He seems to have genuinely enjoyed his work there but contracted tuberculosis, succumbing to the disease three years after his arrival. Mercer tried to maintain connections with the others she coaxed into traveling to Liberia at her expense to become teachers or missionaries. But, based on the account in her biography, we may be able to learn more today about the fate of these and other colonists than she was able to learn in her lifetime. Her biographer notes that “she mention[ed] the delight occasioned

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by the return of one, since ‘from him she could learn the condition of the rest.’”14 In 1844, when Mercer was ill and in failing health, a white friend shared information about her travels to Liberia, saying that several colonists “flocked to the mission house at Mount Vaughan [in Cape Palmas] . . . anxiously begging [for] some information of ‘Miss Margaret.’” According to this friend’s account, they expressed a strong sense of “attachment to their dear ‘Miss Margaret’” and asked her to send them a picture.15 If this report was an authentic one—not simply an attempt to cheer an ailing friend—this would have been the Jennings family, all of whom relocated to Cape Palmas in 1834. The older members of the Jennings family who left the United States as young adults may have been fully able to remember Mercer and ask after her. For younger family members, however, their sponsor may have become a fading memory after arriving in Liberia in 1829. Due to Mercer’s decision not to benefit from forced labor in her own life, she was in a position that was completely foreign to the vast majority of women in her social class: She needed to earn her own living. Like so many intellectually oriented women in this era, education became her life’s work. Her career as an educator began at a private school established by Kate (Noland) Garnett, the wife of a cousin, James Mercer Garnett, in Essex County, Virginia. By the 1830s, Mercer was exploring educational theories prevalent at the time: the Lancaster method, as well as an innovative program named for the Swiss educator Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg (1771–1844). Fellenberg schools were designed to provide agricultural and manual training to poor children, liberal arts education to middle-class children, and pedagogical training to aspiring teachers. Ideally, these schools would create a communitybased educational setting that would help erode, and ultimately erase, the economic and social divides between rich and poor. The idea inspired Mercer, and she tried to convince another community leader, Daniel Murray, to join her in establishing such a school. Mercer’s letters suggest that she may have envisioned a Fellenberg school for students of color, since Murray shared her views on slavery and had also freed his slaves.16 It seems that the plan never



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materialized, but Mercer established a school of her own for girls instead— opening first to ten tuition-paying students and five poor children. The record strongly suggests that all of her students were of European heritage. But, as noted earlier, she provided at least informal education to many people of color in her lifetime, despite the severe social and legal restrictions against doing so.

Mercer’s Popular Lectures on Ethics Mercer had difficulty identifying adequate textbooks for her students, so she developed at least two of her own: “A Course of Bible Studies” and the ethics textbook under discussion in this chapter, written in 1837. As noted earlier, this is one of the first philosophy textbooks published in the Americas. It would deserve attention for that reason alone, but the quality and care with which it was written makes it an especially important “first” in women’s intellectual and philosophical history in North America. A number of women had begun to publish books about moral ideals in the late eighteenth century. They were often cast as “letters” to mothers or daughters, and they launched a tradition that continued into the early 1900s.17 Generally they addressed the moral development of women and girls in and through discussions of family relationships, religious devotion, the moral or religious instruction of children, proper hygiene, and effective housekeeping practices. But Mercer was the first to take hold of ethics as an independent area of inquiry and discuss it academically, aligning herself with other thinkers in the history of philosophy who did the same, some of whom earned a place in the canon. Popular Lectures on Ethics is a 200-page book that deserves a full analysis of its own. The scope of this study of women thinkers allows me to provide just an outline of the ideas discussed in the work, however. Mercer opens by establishing the terrain to be covered. Her subject is moral philosophy as an area of thought that is essential for students to understand, for both intellectual and practical reasons. As is common among the women under discussion

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throughout this volume, she saw education and morality as inextricably linked. Only those who fully understand the world, humanity’s place in it, and our obligation (she believes) to God and the created order can be truly ethical. The teacher’s sole purpose should be to provide instruction that will not only deliver content to students—historical figures and events, scientific theories and processes, literary texts and their themes, for instance—but also guide them through a process of deep inquiry to foster self-development. She wrote the book with this last purpose in mind. The duty of teachers, she says, is to “imbue the young mind with sound moral principles; to impart to it distinct notions of the meaning of the words truth, justice, charity, honor, and to make it both feel and understand the nature of duty.”18 This would ensure that young adults will be prepared to fend off any immoral influences they encounter when entering the world and will help them maintain their “zealous resolutions” to pursue the good throughout their lives.19 In the first ten of the forty chapters of this book, Mercer discusses human intellectual and moral capacities. She begins by distinguishing between metaphysics (which for her includes ontology as well as some elements of epistemology) and ethics. This is followed by an examination of the “compound nature” of humans as both spiritual/intellectual and physical beings whose ability to attain knowledge can help them transcend their finitude. Mercer incorporates the free will/determinism debate into this discussion. Within Mercer’s framework, a discussion of human knowledge and moral capacity is meaningless, if not impossible, without an analysis of the nature of God and the relationship of human beings to the Divine. Humans are created by God as compound beings: The physical aspects of our nature are created by God. But God, a nonmaterial being, stands outside the created, physical order; therefore the physical aspects of our compound nature are distinct from the spiritual nature of the Divine. The spiritual aspect of our nature, on the other hand, is fully derived from God. This means that in regard to the physical aspects of our nature, we are separate and distinct from God. But the spiritual aspects of our nature come directly from the Divine, who has



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given us a share of God’s very own nature—albeit only a matter of degrees of such. Even if other creatures are also “compound” beings, we share a far higher degree of God’s spiritual nature than any other being in creation. Since our spiritual nature is derived from God—not created by God as an aspect of nature that stands apart from the Divine—it is possible to develop and expand spiritually by attuning ourselves to God’s ideals and virtues. Mercer believes we can do this by observing evidence of God’s handiwork and imitating divine ideals. Therefore, it is possible for us to use our intellect and exercise our moral will in such a way as to grow and develop as spiritual beings. By contrast, our propensity to err is based on our choice to follow the demands of our physical nature rather than our spiritual nature, in Mercer’s view. Fluency in the ideas of both Descartes and Locke is evident in these chapters—she develops a moral version of Descartes’ “evil genius” argument, for instance. Also apparent is an Aristotle-inspired overview of the need to keep human passions and appetites in check if one is to maintain balance in life. Mercer then explores our “compound nature” further, and in doing so she again demonstrates familiarity with Descartes, belies the influence of Locke, and suggests some acquaintance with German idealism. She begins in standard empirical fashion, saying that the senses provide material that enters the mind. Then she makes some interesting philosophical moves. She indicates that the mind automatically works on the material of sense perception and processes it. She does not say how this processing takes place. In fact, she refuses to address that problem. Much as Hume dismissed the “secret power” question in his discussion of causation—we do not actually observe causation, he said, we simply observe a correlation of events, and this suffices as an explanation on a practical level— so too, Mercer was content to accept humans’ inability to fully understand the relationship between sensation and perception and ultimately of body and mind: Intellect or mind is that [entity] in a being which thinks. Here we must stop; for we know no more. We cannot for an instant suppose [mind] to be material, but must be contented to know it by its operations.20

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Mercer’s main interest is not in analyzing how cognition takes place, but in cultivating intellect—if possible to “bring all the faculties to their highest development.”21 And the ultimate goal is to educate, not simply to ensure full intellectual flourishing, but for the sake of expanding in spiritual growth and moral virtue. In the earliest stages of an infant’s life, for example, Mercer maintains that “each sense and mental faculty . . . can scarcely be said to exist.” But when a person is well educated, “the mind becomes so powerful as to exalt the individual almost to superhuman virtue, talent, or wisdom.”22 In a move similar to that made by Margaret Cavendish, Mercer addressed the mind/body problem by asserting that there are degrees of cognition throughout the body. The human body, she argues, is a physical entity that, like other purely physical entities, has limitations. But the human mind is a spiritual entity. While not infinite, it is expansive, able to venture beyond the merely physical in order to comprehend abstractions, ideals, and values. Cerebral matter, which is distributed throughout the body, facilitates sensation—and thus serves as a connection between our physical and spiritual natures.23 After making these claims, Mercer readies herself for potential objections—relying on theologically grounded reasoning: “The opinion, that spirit cannot be cognisant of material things, seems to rest upon an unauthorized assumption; else, how does God, who is a Spirit, see his own works which are material?”24 Like Maria Stewart, discussed later, Mercer was a deeply religious woman who was well schooled in Christian texts, ideals, and concepts. Therefore, after a short discussion of how to increase our intellectual and moral capacities, the middle chapters of her Ethics are devoted to religious and moral instruction, which will be of interest to historians of religion. For the purposes of this study, however, the last group of chapters at the end of the book is significant: on economics, regarding duties to others, and discussing the right to property as well as justice and benevolence. Although the influence of Scottish Enlightenment thought is apparent in these chapters, there is also evidence that Mercer has not simply adopted Scottish thinkers’ views wholesale but interpreted and recast them in her own historical context.



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In the chapter “On liberality and economy,” Mercer offers the standard advice to maintain a proper balance financially, between frugality and indulgence. But she would rather have her readers err on the side of frugality, waste as well as neglect of the poor being significant offenses against Christian moral values. Similarly, her understanding of our duties to others assumes a high level of responsibility, not simply for members of our own family or local communities, but for all of our fellow human beings: He who does not view the race of man as one family . . . and who does not find his heart yearning after the spiritual good of nations . . . is not a child of God, nor a co-heir with Christ in eternal glory. Such are the principles of our duty to our fellow creatures.25 Mercer has more in common with Edmund Burke and certain branches of Christian teaching than she does with the classic liberalism of John Locke in her chapter on the “Right of Property.” Property rights, she claims, derive from the right of inheritance and God’s command to us to subdue the earth. Since paternal forms of governance were, Mercer believes, created by God, it is only natural that children will inherit land (and other property) from their parents. Note that the emphasis for Mercer is not on a person’s labor as a form of investment in the land itself, as was the case for Locke, but a supposed natural right of inheritance. Interestingly, she takes time to consider the problem of colonialism: In too many instances, land is seized by violence or coercion. The very soil Mercer’s family had owned for 200 years was first occupied by her English-born ancestor. “And I doubt whether I, his heir, have any right which I could plead in heaven against the daughter of an Indian chief, whose pipes and hatchets, buried in the soil, remain as memorials of his earlier proprietorship.”26 Mercer’s logic here is remarkably modern, and her sympathies are clearly aligned with Native American communities. Writing when Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal” policies were in place and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was under development, she offers a counterpoint to the dominant political mood of the day. Based on her reasoning, the indigenous family does indeed

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have a stronger claim to the land than she has as a European-heritage usurper. Her view is that a property owner “has either a right of inheritance, which is of immemorial date (such as the Indians have), in which case it is presumed to be the original gift of God. Or he has a right which is recently acquired,” in which case, a dispute could arise forcing each party to prove their right to ownership.27 Her conclusion? In our imperfect world property rights are often violated, and while this is also a violation of God’s law, possession becomes the accepted standard for determining ownership. Therefore, while in theory a Native American could declare rights to the Mercer family property, in practice, she was content to accept the status quo. In her chapters on justice and benevolence, Mercer stands squarely in the tradition of Hume, Smith, and the later and lesser-known thinker Marietta Kies, whose life and work is discussed in volume two. Justice is the familiar concept of granting a person what he or she is due. Just practices are expected and may be demanded. Benevolence, on the other hand, is supererogatory and therefore is to be received in gratitude. Mercer does not limit her discussion of justice to public/political goods and benefits, however. Contrary to thinkers like Burke and Hegel, she saw principles of justice as applicable within the realm of home and family. It is not simply a moral lapse, but an injustice when parents neglect or mistreat their children. In addition, our actions are blameworthy if we ignore the needs of others, whether they are loved ones or members of our local communities or the poor and troubled who are at a distance. Yet, it is at this point that benevolence and charity must come into play. Charitable activity of all kinds expands our moral capacities and enlarges our awareness of all people as a great human family. In order to heed God’s call to treat others with benevolence, however, we must recognize that “charity may be called a science by itself, for active charity requires system.”28 Individuals who act charitably must live frugally and carefully select the means of giving to others to ensure that their efforts are effective. Joining with others to form a charitable association has a number of benefits. It generates sympathy for the needy and builds bonds with charitable others. It provides wisdom and it provides power,



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or strength in numbers, as we say—a ready pool of contributors with a wide range of expertise to engage in strategizing and problem solving. The best charitable activity, in Mercer’s view is paternal, interpersonal (not performed by an impersonal organization, for instance), and responsible to the longterm benefit of those in need. Many of the points Mercer made in the closing chapters of this book “On patriotism” and “Harmony of the moral principles” revisit aspects of her discussion of charity/benevolence. In her view, God’s act of creating and sustaining the universe was grounded in divine love for the world and a desire for human beings to bring goodness to the created order as well as to each other.

Maria Stewart One of the first women political writers of any race/culture in North America and quite likely the first woman to lecture in public to both mixed-gender and mixed-race audiences, Maria (Miller) Stewart (1803–79) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803. Orphaned at the age of five, she was “bound out” to a minister and his family where she worked as a domestic servant until she was fifteen years old. By the 1820s, she was in Boston and married James W. Stewart, a shipping agent, in 1826. She and her husband lived and worked among the free black population in Boston, and were closely associated with David Walker. Maria Stewart would develop working relationships with other progressive thinkers after her husband’s death, giving lectures and writing articles that were published in William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery periodical, The Liberator. Stewart had little formal education, but she knew and discussed the work of David Walker in depth with others in her social/political circles. Like so many women in her era, she was also well versed in the Bible and familiar with Christian doctrines and concepts. In Boston, she made a name for herself as an abolitionist and anti-colonialist, one of the first to appear in print. It

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is during this early stage in her career that the majority of her lectures were published. She lived in New York through much of the 1830s and 1840s, where she continued to give public lectures and worked along with Frederick Douglass to urge for abolition and racial equality. She lived in Baltimore for a short time, though little is known about her life and work there. By the 1860s, she had relocated to Washington, D.C., where she became matron of the Freedman’s Bureau Hospital, remaining there until her retirement in 1878. From the informal accounting of her work and professional associations she wrote toward the end of her life, it is clear she interacted with a number of people in the thriving African American community in Washington, most notably the Episcopal minister Alexander Crummell.

Virtue, Freedom, and Unity Maria Stewart was one of very few female social and political critics of any race in North America in her day. Writing at the height of the Second Great Awakening, a wave of evangelical Christian fervor in the United States, Stewart’s work is infused with religious passion. This feature will be welcomed by many people of faith today, but it is one that is rather puzzling to secularminded readers. It is important to keep a few things in mind in relation to Stewart’s religiously infused rhetoric: First, as noted in the introduction to this volume, the religious domain was one in which women were able to claim authority in the nineteenth century. It is to be noted that the same was true for men of color in this era. Stewart and scores of other women like her— across races and cultures—embraced this domain and were happy to exercise this authority. Second, shortly after her husband’s death in 1829, Stewart went through a “born again” conversion experience that led her to fully embrace an evangelical form of Christian faith. Her pleas for justice, equality, and unity, which she makes in and through her understanding of God, were heartfelt. Third, her readers would have been thoroughly familiar with this kind of discourse. During the Second Great Awakening, public figures employed this



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approach to faith expression: Lyman Beecher, president of Lane Theological Seminary; Charles Finney, president of Oberlin; Levisa Barnes Buck, a Universalist; and Jarena Lee, leader of the African American Spiritualist movement were all deeply immersed in evangelical thought and practice in this era. Like these thinker/activists, Stewart’s theological claims were woven into her calls for social/political change. Throughout her work, Stewart emphasizes three major themes: women’s role in society as virtuous leaders, education as a path to moral goodness and political freedom, and the need for unity among people of African descent. Like so many of her peers prior to the entrance of more diverse voices into intellectual life in the Americas, Stewart makes a point of establishing her right to speak as a woman and as a person of color. And she does so by invoking both male authority and divine authority. She claims that it was the noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his business partner, Isaac Knapp, who urged her to write because women’s influence could be powerful in addressing social issues—abolition in particular. She added, however, that she was also inspired by her belief in God, saying her “soul became fired with a holy zeal” for the cause.29 She further described the process by which she was awakened to her own sense of divine purpose, culminating in a belief that God had assigned her—a woman—to lead her people, to lecture and publish for God’s own “wise and holy purposes, best known to himself.”30 Stewart continues to validate her own authority as a woman by marching her readers through a number of examples of women who asserted leadership in literature and history: Deborah and Esther in the Hebrew scriptures, Mary Magdelene in the Christian tradition, the oracles in Greece, the sibyls in the Roman world, Laura di Bassi in Italy. Along the way, she debunked claims in the New Testament that women should be silent in church. “Did St. Paul but know of our wrongs and deprivations, I presume he would make no objections to our pleadings in public for our rights. . . . [W]omen of refinement in all ages, more or less, have had a voice in moral, religious, and political subjects.”31 Her conclusion is that women can and should participate in public discourse,

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bringing their special capacities for care, nurture, and moral rectitude to the world in which they live. As a thinker who accepted the commonly held view that women are innately maternal beings, Stewart believed that women of African descent had a specialized role to play in public life, namely as mothers and educators who can contribute to racial uplift. Using the prophetic voice she so frequently invoked, her words cry out from the page: “O ye mothers, what a responsibility rests on you! You have souls committed to your charge, and God will require a strict account of you.”32 Passages infused with this level of conviction about the impact of women as a nurturing force in society appear a number of times throughout Stewart’s writings. And in her gender/morality formula, because of their influence, women would do well to embrace moral virtue and religious piety: “Your example is powerful, your influence great; it extends over your husbands and your children, and throughout the circle of your acquaintance. . . . Let me exhort you to cultivate among yourselves a spirit of Christian love and unity.”33 Along with other thinkers discussed in this volume, Stewart endorsed gender complementarity and agreed that women play a central role in nurturing children as mothers or teachers. In these roles, women’s primary concern must be to guide children in developing “a love of virtue, the abhorrence of vice, and the cultivation of a pure heart.”34 A concerted effort to fully educate children of African descent would result in a reformation of sorts within communities of color: Adults within these communities would contribute to the nurture of individual children, enhance their own learning, and develop greater powers of understanding overall. Better still, Stewart was convinced that women would lead the way. Again, quoting the Bible, she asserted that African American women educators would be “an ornament of grace” and would deliver “a crown of glory”35 to those under their influence. Here Stewart’s view that women possess an innate moral sense becomes apparent, which leads in turn to her understanding of the interrelation of education and morality. For Stewart, education has inherent value. But she agreed with Mercer that education was also a precondition for moral development. Emerging



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out of an era in which education was provided almost solely for the sake of religious indoctrination, the two shared this view with many women and men in their day. What Stewart brings to the table, however, is a nascent critical race theory within her discussion of education and morality. First, she laments the roadblocks to education that African Americans had met in the United States: There are “no chains so galling,” she says, “as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge.” She then goes on to recognize that her own academic training was curtailed but turns this observation into validation of her role and purpose as a voice for change: “Alas! I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy Spirit.”36 She sees her own situation as parallel to that of many of her contemporaries of color, however. And she maintains that, generally speaking, a lack of education has a direct and negative impact on the moral strength of any community. With more access to education, people of African descent could flourish as individuals, create a virtuous community, and gain respect in the dominant culture. If she and other African Americans had received half the advantages of whites, she said, “I would defy the government of these United States to deprive us any longer of our rights.”37 Yet it is at this point that Stewart endorses assimilationism—for the African American community as a whole and for women of color in particular. In a lecture delivered at the African Masonic Hall, presumably to a majority-black audience, Stewart charged that people of African descent need to “turn their attention to knowledge and improvement; for knowledge is power.”38 But then she converts this inspiring assertion into an internal criticism of her community. Where are the African American scientists, philosophers, politicians, and others among the intellectual elite? Similarly, she wants to hold African-heritage youth accountable for their own selfeducation and moral improvement. She dissuades them, for instance, from spending time and money on entertainment. Instead, she urges them to aim for “mental and moral improvement,” specifically by joining

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temperance societies and other reform efforts.39 While recognizing the larger cultural forces at play—namely the wielding of political power by the white-dominant society—Stewart not only wants to hold her community to account but suggests that their own religious and moral failings have been to blame. Perhaps, she suggests, her people have “provoked the Almighty . . . [to] give our glory unto others” and cast a “thick mist of moral gloom” over the African American community.40 Stewart holds her peers among women of color culpable as well. She calls on young women to have the same idealized character traits white women were urged to embody in this era: “delicacy of manners,” “gentleness and dignity,” and “pure minds” that will “hold vice in abhorrence and contempt.”41 Taking her assimilationism one step further, she asserts that men of color would be more likely to support and protect women of African descent if they were to adopt such ideals of femininity. Again, she asserts that African Americans as a group would win greater respect and earn a place in dominant culture, society, and politics if they met Europeanheritage standards of achievement and behavior. Why, she asks, have they been unable to succeed at raising funds for schools and churches like their white counterparts? If African Americans would simply coordinate efforts and join together as a unified whole, they could achieve so much more as a people.42 This becomes a distinguishing feature of Stewart’s ideas: her discussion of the role and influence of women of color is intertwined with a push for unity among members of the African diaspora. It is worth noting at this point that later male thinkers are often credited with introducing pan-Africanism to North America, among them W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, and Marcus Garvey. Yet, we see Stewart’s commitment to such nearly fifty years before any of these men were even born. Stewart’s interest in pan-African unity seems to have been partly pragmatic. By joining together as a cohesive network of individuals, people of color in the United States could improve their social and economic condition, eradicate



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racism, and gain political power within the dominant culture over time. But her argument for unity begins with a critique: It appears to me that there are no people under the heavens so unkind and so unfeeling towards their own, as are the descendants of fallen Africa. . . . The general cry among the people is, “Our own color are our greatest opposers”; and even the whites say that we are greater enemies toward each other, than they are towards us.43 In contrast, she observed that revolutionaries in Greece, Poland, and Haiti united as a people and rebelled against the forces of oppression. She notes that even disparate and “wild” indigenous groups across North America had worked in unity to gain political strength: “Insult one of them, and you insult a thousand. They also have contended for their rights and privileges, and are held in higher repute than we are.”44 Stewart then moved to inspiring her audience. Typical of her rhetorical style, she made use of the prophetic voice to assure her audience that God has “formed and fashioned you in his own glorious image” and “bestowed upon you reason and strong powers of intellect.”45 In time, Stewart declared, God would honor “Ethiopia,” lifting up and redeeming its people, but also said that her contemporaries needed to play an active role in this process.46 “Never will the chains of slavery and ignorance burst,” she says, “till we become united as one and cultivate in ourselves the pure principles of piety, morality, and virtue.”47 This is not to say that Stewart was blind to the racism that blockaded the path to African American achievement. Calling European-heritage contemporaries to account, she denounced the stain of slavery as a national vice and called on whites to repent of the sin of racism. She lamented a national history in which a European-dominant society drove indigenous peoples from their homelands and enslaved and abused African-heritage peoples.48 At the time she was delivering her message, leaders in the dominant culture in the United States were raising money to support liberation movements in Poland, Greece, and Ireland. Yet, she critically observed, they failed to provide aid to Haiti or

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recognize it as a sovereign nation. No doubt, the race bias behind this lack of support was not missed on Stewart. In what way was the Haitian rebellion distinct from those in Europe? Only in the color of the freedom fighters’ skin and the deeply entrenched tradition of slavery that they were able to overthrow. In addition, Stewart issued a reminder to her white contemporaries that charity begins at home. People of African descent on US soil—both slave and free—were struggling under a system of racial oppression. Why not support and uplift them? Expressing utter contempt for the “colonization” movement to repatriate people of color in the newly established colony of Liberia, she charged that the best way to help African-heritage people to advance would be to raise money for higher education, rather than send them off to a land that is foreign to them. She muses: “Methinks their hearts are so frozen toward us they had rather their money should be sunk in the ocean than to administer it to our relief.” In a rare moment of bitter cynicism, she added, “I fear, if they dared, like Pharaoh, king of Egypt, they would order every male child among us to be drowned.”49 Continuing to be aligned with the ideas of revolutionary thinkers, like David Walker, Stewart maintained that it was “useless for us any longer to sit with our hands folded, reproaching the whites; for that will never elevate us.”50 Instead it was time to rise up politically and demand rights—both by joining whites in the Anti-Slavery Society and through self-advocacy. In the end, Stewart claimed to feel assured that the social/political structures of dominant white culture could not “quell the proud, fearless, and undaunted spirits of the Africans forever.” “We will not come out against you with swords,” she said, “but we will tell you that our souls are fired with the same love of liberty and independence with which your souls are fired. . . . AND WE CLAIM OUR RIGHTS.”51

Pauline Johnson Pauline Johnson (1861–1913) was one of four children in a prominent family on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, roughly twenty-five miles (forty



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kilometers) inland from the current city of Hamilton on Lake Ontario.52 Her father, Henry Johnson, was the son of a Mohawk chief and a tribal leader, and her mother, Emily (Howells) Johnson was the daughter of a prominent Englishman who moved his family to Canada when Emily was a teenager. The marriage of a couple from influential families in two disparate cultural groups was controversial at the time, particularly because in most mixed-race unions, the male was from the dominant European culture and the woman was a person of color. The family lived on the reserve in a Georgian-style estate on two hundred acres of land. Her parents were active in the social and cultural life of both cultures, indigenous and European, and made a point of demonstrating that in Canadian society it was possible to live successfully with a hybrid identity. Tragically, however, Johnson’s father was killed in a racially motivated attack when she was twenty-three years old. It is after this point that she began to express her ideals and identity as a writer with mixed heritage. The vast majority of Johnson’s writings consisted of poetry, with some fiction and folklore mixed in, which she not only committed to the printed page but also presented as performance pieces. Fortunately, for those of us interested in the early development of social/political philosophy in North America, she also wrote essays about racial/cultural identity, gender identity, and issues related to assimilation on the cusp of the twentieth century, when she adopted the Iroquois name of her great-grandfather, Tekahionwake, which has been rendered “Double Wampum” or “Two Lives.” Johnson was educated primarily by her mother at home but attended Brantford Collegiate Institute as a teenager, graduating in 1877. Living in two worlds as she did, Johnson was influenced by a number of cultural and intellectual forces. Her father’s Mohawk heritage was a source of inspiration to her, and she referred to it frequently in her writings. Her mother had Quaker heritage, and no doubt the pacifism and consensus building that is characteristic of Quakerism influenced Johnson as she sought to use writing as a bridge across cultures. There is evidence that she read influential literature by European-heritage writers in her era, most notably the work of Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. At the same time,

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she had a deep sense of connection to her indigenous heritage, both in lived experience and as intellectualized by emerging academic disciplines. Horatio Hale, her father’s European-heritage friend and colleague who sought to preserve indigenous traditions and folklore, was an early influence, as were other early anthropologists and ethnologists: Francis Parkman, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and George Catlin. She was also familiar with and supportive of the emerging critical race theory of her peers in indigenous intellectual and activist circles with whom she joined in founding the Society of American Indians: Sherman Coolidge (Arapaho), Arthur C. Parker (Seneca), Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai Apache), Laura Kellogg (Oneida), Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), and Emma Johnson Goulette (Potawatomi), who is discussed in Chapter 2. Finally, but not insignificantly, there is strong evidence that Johnson was influenced by her contemporaries in feminist thought and endorsed the women’s rights movement. Critics have identified the complex strains of imperialism and assimilationism Pauline Johnson seemed to espouse at times. Yet, as noted by Fee and Nason, it is important not to take a one-dimensional view of Johnson and her work.53 She was clearly committed to the support and preservation of indigenous culture in North America. And like many of her colleagues in the Society of American Indians, with her mixed cultural identity, she sought to find a middle ground between assimilationism and separatism. Toward this end, she wrote several essays discussing issues related to race/culture, gender, and assimilation—of interest for this study: “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” “The Iroquois Women of Canada—By One of Them,” “Lodge and Lawmakers,” “A Pagan in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” “Mothers of a Great Red Race,” and “Stings of Civilization.” If there is one theme that runs throughout Johnson’s essays, it is that indigenous culture was misunderstood, and she saw it as her task to educate her readers, of European as well as indigenous descent, about it. So she spends a good deal of time offering comparisons: There is no such thing as a uniform “Indian” culture, she says on a number of occasions, any more than there is



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a uniform “European” culture. It makes no more sense to lump together the wide range of tribal cultures across North America, for instance, than it does to speak of the English and the Turks as though they are one people.54 There are vast differences between various tribes across North America, and both the dominant culture and Johnson’s contemporaries in the indigenous world would do well to recognize this. Johnson expresses a great deal of cultural pride and confidence in the Iroquois system of governance as she understood it. As noted in recent decades by scholars in the United States, the Six Nations of Iroquois in North America’s midwestern regions established a confederacy in the days of Hiawatha, which may have preceded other forms of collaborative governance, except perhaps for English and Swiss systems.55 Johnson informs her readers that this confederacy was overseen by a governing council of fifty noble families that considered issues of importance to the tribes with decorum and gravity. There was little in the way of the angry and aggressive debate in Iroquois political tradition, which is so applauded in English-derived forms of government in North America. Iroquois leaders refrained from using “speech that may breed dissension.” Instead, Iroquois delegates would choose their words carefully and speak calmly, to make what they say more palatable to their listeners. Using a colorful cultural illustration, Johnson said that, just as warriors of old would wrap and decorate a stone club used in battle in order to soften its appearance, people must cloak their speech with care and concern. In Iroquois governance, councilors did not display “the grim baldness of the stone alone” as was the case in the sessions of parliament Johnson observed while in England.56 Also notable in Iroquois governance was the role assigned to women, which Johnson highlights repeatedly. Traditionally, nobility was inherited through the maternal line. When there was a vacant seat on the council of the Six Nations, one woman in each of the fifty noble families had the duty of determining which of her sons would fill this seat.57 Whether it was her eldest, her youngest, or an adopted son, the woman’s decision was accepted without question. Only on the rarest occasions was a woman asked to speak on behalf

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of her nominee—to require her to do so was considered a challenge to her authority and thus a great offense. Similarly in discussions of law and policy, women’s voices were welcomed, according to Johnson. Though women did not generally sit in on council discussions, their points of view were respected, and their opinions were taken seriously. There was no parallel in European society to the power and influence exercised by the “chief matron” of the Iroquois, according to Johnson. No man, “whether chief, brave, or warrior,” would question her authority.58 Johnson muses about the vast differences between women’s status within her own indigenous culture and in the dominant culture, in which women had little political or economic identity throughout her lifetime. She also debunks the myth that Iroquois women were overworked because indigenous men lack initiative. Instead, she characterizes women’s work within her culture as engaging and rewarding. Indigenous women, she said, were just as motivated to master the domestic arts as their counterparts in European-heritage society.59 Furthermore, she reported seeing more abuse of women in European society than had ever existed in indigenous cultures: women on the plains of Ohio harvesting hay, for instance, or women in the Canadian Northwest literally pulling plows like beasts of burden, under threat of a whipping by a man overseeing the work.60 She maintained that indigenous men had never acted violently toward women like “the lower orders of white men,” who “from unbridled temper or mere brutality beat their wives if immediate submission is not given.” It had only been since the introduction of alcohol to the Iroquois and other tribes that indigenous men’s minds became addled enough to have become abusive.61 Women’s role within Iroquois society more generally is one that Johnson largely celebrates—at each stage of life, though she focuses primarily on young adulthood and motherhood. Idealizing her culture’s traditions, as did many women across races and cultures throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Johnson characterizes feminine identity in Iroquois life as free, empowering, and infused with maternal goodness. In “semi-civilized” indigenous society, as she calls it, Johnson claims that women are still largely



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free to live in harmony with nature, loving the natural world themselves and teaching their children to appreciate and embrace it.62 Although this means they were sometimes subjected to day-to-day physical struggles, indigenous women, she claims, did not need to “wage war” against unnatural foods, frivolous clothing, or modern entertainments and lifestyles.63 At the same time, the pressure to assimilate created many conflicts for Iroquois women, especially mothers. In order to be responsible to her children and engage in effective parenting within the dominant culture, the indigenous woman had to essentially renounce every maternal impulse and social/cultural value she had within her. She had to set aside her religion, which taught that the Great Spirit was eternally welcoming and forgiving, and accept instead the then-popular Christian notion that a God of judgment favored only an elect and faithful few and would condemn the rest to the fires of hell. “In her pagan heart, she knows there is but one world for the Indian’s soul,” an eternal hunting ground where the Great Spirit welcomes all, but she “has to teach what to her is a falsity.”64 So too with other indigenous ideals: understandings of bravery and war, sharing rather than hoarding goods, and maintaining patterns of dress and adornment. Johnson reminds her readers that they need not agree with indigenous perspectives in order to understand and respect the sense of cultural loss—even feelings of betraying their own sense of selfhood— that Iroquois mothers in particular experience when they adjust to life in an increasing modernized European-dominant culture.65 Johnson recognized that the European-dominant culture’s inability to understand the conflicts indigenous women face is due largely to ignorance, and inaccurate portrayals in popular literature contributed to the problem. The vast majority of novels that involved indigenous women were written, Johnson charges, by people who “have never been on an Indian reserve in their lives, have never met a ‘real live’ Redman, have never even read [historians and ethnographers] Parkman, Schoolcraft, or Catlin.”66 As a result, the majority of novels provided not well-adjusted female characters who live happily as indigenous women but a caricature. Johnson’s writing takes on a sardonic edge

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as she provides a sketch of the Indian girl prototype. Her critique anticipated the discussions of the double-burden of racism and sexism, or intersectionality, that have been brought to our awareness in recent decades: The Indian girl’s name was always exotic, she said, at least to the nineteenth-century European ear—a name that had a “Winona sound about it”—such as Ramona, Wacousta, Iena. The “Indian girl” was never the heroine, but always the sidekick. She was sincere, noble, and strong, she was also emotionally needy and was always mooning over a handsome European-heritage protagonist, although Johnson maintains that publicly displaying affection was strongly discouraged in many indigenous cultures. She was an ever-faithful friend to the fragile white woman to whom the hero of the story had promised his heart. And since “Winona’s” love for him could never be requited, more often than not she was driven to suicide in her grief. Johnson notes that inserting a “native” suicide into the story was a common literary move, whether the character in question was male or female. Again, however, she insists that suicide was virtually unheard of in her own indigenous culture. In the end, Johnson calls for more realistic portrayals of indigenous-heritage women as individuals. She wants no more of the noble savage metaphors—a woman who is “‘fawnlike, deer-footed,’ ‘fireeyed,’ ‘crouching,’ [or] ‘submissive.’” Instead Johnson calls on her fellow writers to portray a more realistic image: whether sweet and womanly, wild, laughing, cultivated, or educated—please, “let her be natural.”67 Pauline Johnson was not without critics in her own day, and her legacy is a complex one just over a century after her death. While she was raised to appreciate the histories and cultures of both parents, her family lived at a time when indigenous lifeways and autonomy were being suppressed. She was relatively privileged throughout her childhood—both in relation to her parents’ high status within their respective cultures and in regard to material wealth and social capital. Yet, she experienced the horror of losing her father to racist violence. In that sense she and her family were forced to reexamine their lives and their social/political place in a rapidly changing world. On a very practical level, this major life event forced Johnson to begin writing to earn her



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own way. This in turn led her to develop a career as the voice of an indigenous woman who lived straddling two worlds.

Ellen Mitchell Ellen (Smith) Mitchell (1838–1920) was born into a middle-class white family and raised near Syracuse, New York. She was married at a young age but seems to have been separated or divorced by 1859 when she graduated from Homer Academy as Mrs. Ellen Slade. She relocated to Cairo, Illinois, and lived with relatives while teaching in the local high school. In 1865 she went to St. Louis to be with her future husband, Joseph Mitchell, and pursue a writing career. Like Anna Brackett, she had success publishing poetry and fiction in magazines and newspapers throughout her life. She used the pen name Ella Ellwood until her marriage in 1867 when she began using her legal name, Mrs. Ellen M. Mitchell, writing essays on philosophy and feminism and teaching in both formal and informal settings. Her published work and correspondence make it clear that Mitchell had studied Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel as well as Hegel’s interpreters, Zeller and Stirling. She was familiar with the work of Goethe as well as that of her older contemporaries in transcendentalism—Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Peabody, and Henry David Thoreau. She was also well versed in first-wave feminist theory and practice in the United States. Mitchell was deeply involved in intellectual life wherever she went: in St. Louis (1865–78), Denver (1878–92), and Syracuse (1893/94–1920). She was often a central figure in philosophy and literature discussion groups—whether mixed-gender or women’s-only clubs. Like many other women, Mitchell began her career as a teacher and taught periodically throughout her life. She published many pieces of poetry and fiction, as well as two articles in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, a book on Greek philosophy, and some feminist lectures. She was one of just a handful

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of women to lecture at the Concord School of Philosophy in Massachusetts in the 1880s and became one of the first women to teach philosophy full-time at the University of Denver, 1890–92; she also taught part-time at Syracuse University in the late 1890s.

Philosophical and Feminist Work In “The Philosophy of Pessimism,” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, it is clear that Mitchell shares some of the same philosophical views expressed by Susan Blow, her colleague in St. Louis. They and others in the idealist movement resisted philosophical systems that grew out of the skeptical tradition. Blow, in particular, was critical of theories that value human reason and judgment over the truth that (she believed) was conveyed to us by the natural, God-given world. Blow, Mitchell, and others in the St. Louis movement considered such theories to be based on negations of reality and distrust of divine truths. In this short essay, Mitchell joins her idealist contemporaries by critiquing Schopenhauer, whose system, she believed, renders genuine Being absent of will; thus, there can be no Absolute to ground reality. Pessimists like Schopenhauer have established “an irrational unconscious impulse” as the supreme force in life. Mitchell declares that Schopenhauer’s ideas present a vacuous and futile philosophy, destined in the end to nihilism. Thankfully however, because of its inherent flaws, she believed that pessimism’s influence will be limited: What is the future of pessimism? . . . We have but to see how it contradicts itself, how it distorts . . . the purest and highest of all spiritual forces—love. . . . Standing halfway between realism and positivism, pessimism merely proves how impossible it is to banish from thought that Divine Idea of the Absolute which has been the strength and consolation of man throughout the ages.68 Mitchell’s lecture, “A Study of Hegel,” was delivered at the Congress of Women in Baltimore in 1884. Thus she joins her philosophically minded colleagues in



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making philosophy accessible to women. Susan Blow’s kindergarten theory was intertwined with discussions of the nature of the soul and the structure of the universe. Anna Brackett’s advocacy of higher education for women was justified by Hegel’s philosophical system as she understood it, and—like Grace Bibb—she delivered her lectures at teachers’ conventions. Written by women and primarily for women, these thinkers introduced female readers to the world of ideas—albeit in a somewhat clandestine fashion, especially in Blow’s case. Mitchell participates in this project as well. In “A Study of Hegel,” she presents philosophy to women who might not otherwise have encountered it. At the same time, she stands apart from Blow, Brackett, and Bibb in that she does so without subterfuge. Hegel is her subject, and an overview of his thought is what she delivers. In this lecture, Mitchell discusses the relation of mind to nature, subject to object, following a quotation from Hegel with an explanation of her own: We communicate with the outward world through the organs of sense; but the impressions received by this means are confused and unrelated, and do not of themselves constitute knowledge, until they have been referred to the unifying power of thought.69 She continues by trying to demonstrate that there is a unity behind all finite objects that makes them recognizable to us. Yet she leans toward subjective idealism on this point and is thus in danger of distorting Hegel’s thought. She asks, “What is it that enables me to compare the separate impressions produced yesterday and to-day, discovering an identity underneath differences?” and offers her own answer, “thought, the thinking ego, something not given by sense, which remains steady amid the flux of impressions.”70 Unfortunately, given the quick overview that Mitchell provides, she doesn’t offer more clarity on this matter. But in this one area she deviates somewhat from St. Louis idealism, particularly that of Susan Blow who was very aware of Hegel’s insistence that the mind must not be said to stand apart from the world as Mitchell here implies. Instead, for Blow sense impressions themselves are

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unified in the Absolute; it is not merely the individual human mind but the underlying structure of the universe that makes sense data cohere. Also interspersed throughout this lecture are references to another matter that was of concern to Mitchell and other early idealists in this era: the relation of the individual to society.71 In line with her colleagues, Mitchell maintains that an isolated individual existing apart from the social order is an impossibility, “an absolute non-entity.”72 In fact, social institutions play a critical role in individual self-determination in Mitchell’s view: I must lose this single, separate self of mine in the larger self of the family, of the state, of the race in order to attain spiritual growth and development. The social institutions that surround me, instead of limiting my freedom, enable me to transcend all that is narrow and selfish, to identify myself with other human beings and make their life my own.73 Here we can see the separate emphases of Blow and Brackett in combination. Blow’s early childhood education theory relies heavily on children’s incorporating previous human achievements into their own sense of selfhood. Brackett favors setting aside individual eccentricities in favor of shared social values. Mitchell, in this brief statement of the relation between self and society, unites the two. Interestingly enough, Mitchell makes only one reference to the educational process, although she attaches it more closely to Hegel’s thought than either Blow or Brackett does. “Mind itself,” she declares, “must pass through a process of development before it reaches what Hegel calls universal or rational self-consciousness”74 So, although she did not make educational theory a priority, she was well acquainted with the American idealist understanding of its theoretical grounding. Mitchell’s essay makes frequent references to interpreters of Hegel, such as Caird, Stirling, Green, and, of course, the recognized male leader of the St. Louis idealists, William Torrey Harris.75 In the positive sense, this demonstrates that she kept abreast of the literature and was able to integrate it into her own



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thought. Negatively speaking, however, this belies Mitchell’s tendency toward an overreliance on the thought of others.

Mitchell’s Concord Lecture In her lecture “Friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics” at the Concord School, Mitchell makes a move similar to that Bibb made when analyzing Lady Macbeth: She provides feminist commentary on a common philosophical question. In making the distinction between love and friendship, Mitchell recognized the low status of women in the ancient world. Since women were “too subordinate and too inferior to man to be his friend in the divinest sense of the word,” their contribution to a relationship, whether in friendship or in marriage, was negligible. Given this low estimation of women, it is no surprise that the Greeks denigrated marriage. Yet Mitchell encouraged her audience to aim for a higher ideal: “True love includes friendship and transcends it. It is friendship glorified. . . . The present ideal is to perfect [marriage] and make the latter [friendship between men and women] possible.” In an unequal relationship, there can be no true friendship because, “one gives more than the other and there is a consequent absence of justice.” The same problem plagued male– female interaction in the ancient world, and according to reports of Mitchell’s address, she believed it continued to plague men and women in her day: It is this lack of equality . . . which prevented friendships between opposites in sex, the men standing towards the women, it is to be presumed, somewhat as the gods did toward the men! This idea has not quite disappeared yet, though we are growing out of it gradually.76 The feminist analysis in Mitchell’s discussion was welcomed by her colleagues. Her friend and correspondent Thomas Davidson spoke next on the Concord School program and led the group in a “long and excellent discussion” of her ideas. He and his friend and colleague, William Torrey Harris, were members of women’s voting rights organizations, and Harris later wrote essays on equal employment and education for women. Mitchell received support

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for her feminist sentiments from both male colleagues, and those attending Concord School sessions—the majority of whom were women—were likeminded people.

Concerning the “Fallen Woman” Mitchell had confirmed her strong commitment to feminism well before her Concord School lecture. In 1874, she took on the indelicate issue of prostitution in “A Plea for Fallen Women,” before the World Congress of Women in Chicago. While other women addressed prostitution during this period, it was not commonly discussed, even among feminists. Yet Mitchell didn’t shy away from it, declaring that the problem of prostitution is rooted in women’s inequality. She maintained that if women had more career options and could get fair wages, they would be less likely to reach the levels of degradation and poverty that drive them to prostitution. She then pointed the finger at men in power who refused to open the job market to women, quoting a madame of a brothel whom she interviewed: “As long as men pay reluctantly the smallest wage for the longest day’s work of hard labor, and pay the highest demanded in these houses, they will be continued.”77 Mitchell then quickly moved to an indictment of double standards for sexual behavior. According to her observations, “A man may have as many loves as he has neckties, wear them as lightly, change them as often, cast them aside as easily as the last,” and it neither affects his social standing, nor endangers his primary relationship with a woman. But if a woman should do the same, her male partner “proclaims her disgrace to the world—to the pitiless world . . . if she turn desperate and defiant, . . . we call her brazen and other words our lips should never utter.”78She encouraged her listeners to “insist upon equal purity of life” for men as well as women.79 In combination with the endorsement of Mitchell’s ideas at the Concord School, it is clear that feminism was a welcome component of the idealist movement in the late nineteenth century. She and several of her colleagues in the early idealist movement—Anna Brackett, Grace Bibb, Eliza Jane Read



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Sunderland, and Lucia Ames Mead—had strong feminist convictions that were integrated into their intellectual work. They also contributed to the development of feminist theory as the twentieth century approached.

A Study of Greek Philosophy Mitchell’s most philosophical work, A Study of Greek Philosophy (1891), was a product of her work with women’s study groups in St. Louis and Denver. The evidence that exists about her presentations to these groups shows that when not addressing women’s issues or venturing into political philosophy, she explicated the Hegelian view of the ancients, their patterns of thought, and their applications to the modern situation. It is likely to have been at the Concord School that she drew together her notes from these lectures and compiled her most ambitious work. Yet there was a fundamental problem with it. Mitchell’s Study was written for a general audience who would have been unable to study Hegel’s work in German, not the new class of professional philosophers in the academy. She did not claim to have done original work but rather acknowledged her “general indebtedness to Zeller and Hegel” for her interpretation of the Greeks: I have consulted all the accessible authorities, but have relied chiefly on the histories of Greek philosophy by Zeller and Hegel. The greater part of Zeller’s work is to be found in an English translation, but not that of Hegel, with the . . . exception [of Harris’ translations of Hegel on Plato and Aristotle].80 George Sylvester Morris took a similar approach when producing some of the first discussions of German idealism in the United States a decade earlier. Even so, Mitchell was harshly criticized by the newly emerging academic establishment in philosophy. In The Philosophical Review, William Hammond (1868–1938) said the work “smacks strongly of dilettantism” and is “unserviceable for pedagogical purposes.” His criticism points to a divide between the cohort of women and men that Mitchell had begun working with in the 1860s. Twenty-three years her junior, Hammond was an up-and-coming

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academic philosopher who was to become a professor at Cornell, where several women discussed in the next volume would earn doctorates then become college professors. His own book on Plato’s theory of virtue in the third and fourth books of the Republic was published in the same year that his review of Mitchell’s Study appeared in The Philosophical Review. His was the new, young class of thinkers ushering in the era of philosophy as an academic profession. Mitchell was a member of an earlier class of philosopher-practitioners who tied ideas to action, theory to practice. Hers was a waning ideal: that of the public intellectual for whom contemplation was an avocation, not (necessarily) tied to their livelihood, and certainly not divorced from everyday life. His was the ascending vision of what philosophy was to become: a narrowly defined discipline, insulated from the outside world within the halls of the academy. This is the world women began to enter when May Preston Slossen became the first woman to earn a doctoral degree in philosophy in the United States, at Cornell University in 1880.

Conclusion Those of us who have studied women in the history of philosophy can only marvel that these women and their work were largely forgotten until the late twentieth century when their books were unearthed and reissued. Why is this? I posit that it is largely because they were indeed transgressing boundaries. Mercer’s first transgression in her lifetime was a cultural/political one: She was a southern white woman who freed the family’s slaves after her father’s death, thereby defying masculine authority and diminishing white dominance. Mercer’s second transgression was not so much an offense as it was a quandary, and it is one she shared with Mitchell: What was philosophy to do with a woman—especially one whose work was designed for female audiences? It is quite likely that the vast majority of men who set up higher education systems in North America in the mid-/late nineteenth century had



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no idea that Mercer’s book, Popular Lectures on Ethics, existed. Those in the masculine mainstream who were aware of Mitchell’s work were critical of her preprofessional approach to philosophy. How would Mercer and Mitchell have gained a full hearing under such circumstances? Both Stewart and Johnson challenged the dominance of Europeanheritage peoples and cultures in North America. They both soundly rejected white hegemony and took a stand for incorporating diverse perspectives and values into the dominant culture. Each of them also transgressed religious boundaries—Stewart by claiming authority within the religious prophetic tradition and Johnson by affirming the value of indigenous religious belief and practice. Each of these thinkers laid a foundation for more women to do similar work and claim authority in these domains. But there is the problem of legacy.81 Who would follow them and carry on the work they started? This is an especially challenging question, considering the many limitations to higher education and professional advancement for women of all races and cultures until well into the twentieth century. (Some would say still.) Today’s textbooks and anthologies make it clear that women who remained within acceptable boundaries have been more readily recognized: “Lady writers,” like Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Sigourney, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick, came of age in the early decades of the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on women’s role in their “proper sphere”—the home. Educators, abolitionists, and other social reformers, like Catherine Beecher, Sojourner Truth, the Grimké sisters, Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Frances Willard, exported domestic virtues into the public sphere by drawing attention to the needs and concerns of society’s most vulnerable members. First-wave feminists, among them Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe, are well known for carrying out their mission to win political equality for women—even if it took the better part of a century to do so. Women in all of these arenas of intellectual history have a place—perhaps not as prominent place as we might wish, but a place nevertheless. Women who crossed the boundaries between

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the masculine and feminine spheres of activity and influence have not fared quite as well. In this chapter, I have attempted to help remedy the situation by bringing the lives and works of these independent intellectuals to light. The following chapter takes the next step toward this end, by introducing the ideas of four female activists as political philosophy.

5 Feminist Activists/Theorists Lucia Ames Mead, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Luisa Capetillo

In the Western tradition, women have been less likely to claim authority in the political realm, no doubt because gender complementarity has been so prevalent. Yet, particularly when we cast the net wider than in the past and include discussions of women’s role and rights, justice for people of color, social reform, and campaigns for political action, we find a considerable number of contributions from which to select. The women discussed in this chapter were all engaged in activism first, theory second. In fact, each of them indicated that they preferred action over theory, practical outcomes over philosophical discourse. In some minds, this will present a problem in regard to their role in philosophy, challenging the very notion of what it means to be a philosopher. Our first impulse is to think of a philosopher as a person who stands apart from social/political life and analyzes ideas (often without acting). Traditionally, we do not expect philosophers to be actively engaged in the world, using ideas to help solve problems or developing ideas in and through their social/political involvement. Yet, examples of both approaches populate the (masculine) history of the discipline: Kant and Hegel were comfortably removed from public life. Locke, Burke, and Mill were active in public life and contributed to political discourse in both the popular and

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intellectual realms. Plato provided a third model, positing a Philosopher King who could stand at a distance, yet diagnose social/political ills. Given the rather wide range of possibilities in this regard, this chapter presents the work of four women who gained renown primarily as social reformers and political activists. Within their respective arenas, each of these women began constructing their theories by observing the social and political concerns around them and acting on those concerns. Ames Mead and Addams saw conflict on both the local and international levels and sought to address it: Ames Mead primarily through education and Addams primarily through community development, both in political activism. The two then constructed a feminist theory of peace that grew out of their involvement in public life, and their theories shared a good deal in common, although Ames Mead placed more emphasis on education and Addams on civicto-global engagement. Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s observations of the conditions of domination and violence around her revealed a crisis that threatened the survival of her community—even her very own life. She explored ideas as an investigative journalist and public intellectual in order both to ensure African Americans could attain equality and to restore the core principles of democracy. WellsBarnett wove discussions of critical race theory, feminism, and justice into her discussions. Luisa Capetillo’s work followed the same pattern. Confronted with the imbalance of power she encountered as a common laborer under colonial rule, she resolved to engage in labor rights activism. She then shared what she had learned through experience and worked to organize her fellow laborers so they could resist the power structures that threatened to overwhelm them. Both Capetillo and Wells-Barnett developed intersectional feminisms: Wells-Barnett by claiming equal moral consideration for African American women and Capetillo by striving for women’s rights as laborers. In regard to consideration of their ideas as philosophy, Ames Mead, Addams, Wells-Barnett, and Capetillo shared two characteristics: boundary-crossing and genre-breaking. In an era in which women had no role in formal political structures, each of these women soundly rejected the traditional notions of women and gender



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roles that reigned in their day. Rather than remain in the home or work in approved “domestic” types of professions, they crossed boundaries into what had traditionally been men’s domain: the world of politics. In spite of being structurally locked out of the political halls of power, they refused to be passive and silent and became politically active—organizing national and international conferences, lobbying politicians, joining in strikes and boycotts, or forming powerful political networks, like the Women’s Peace Party. Better still for our purposes, they published the ideas that either led them to engage in activism in the first place or emerged from their social/political campaigns. Thus they provide us with “on-the-ground” accounts of the theoretical foundations of their work and its development as their activism evolved. The women discussed in this chapter also defy the norms of genre in philosophy. Yet, it is natural that each of them would have used a “hybrid and alternative discourse”1 as women who were not trained as academics. Although Ames Mead and Addams were well-to-do white women, they came of age at a time when many educational institutions simply refused to admit women. Wells-Barnett and Capetillo both struggled to gain access to education due to their cultural and economic conditions but were voracious readers who found the acquisition of knowledge irresistible. Ames Mead and Wells-Barnett wrote as journalists and public intellectuals who were educating their readers. They were the self-assigned data-gatherers whose mission it was to share what they learned and use the knowledge they gained to effect change. Addams wrote primarily in narrative form. She aimed to share the stories and experiences of everyday people and communities to make their needs and interests come alive. In the translations available in English, Capetillo’s choice of genre tended to shift. She wrote both creative works and expository pieces. In the selections discussed in this chapter, she wrote in a personal, engaging tone, as if inviting her reader to think through a problem with her, so they could work to solve it together. Each of these women often wrote first in short-form publications— newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, or published speeches—and only later

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compiled their writings for publication in book form. Therefore, they received responses (both positive and negative) before taking the next step in their activism or sending their next article to press. In this sense, although they defy the genre norms of philosophy, it may be that their work was better informed than the work of the proverbial philosopher in the tower. Some readers may remain skeptical and determine that the women in this chapter are perhaps “philosophical thinkers,” but not quite “philosophers.” Even so, it seems to me their work deserves consideration. At the very least, the ideas these women discussed are informative and valuable for us to reflect on philosophically today.

Lucia Ames Mead Lucia Ames Mead (1856–1936) was born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, to Nathan and Elvira (Coffin) Ames, the parents of four other children in an upper middle-class white family. She received some formal education at Salem State Normal School as well as advanced tutoring from her older brother Charles Ames, a graduate of Amherst College and future editor at D.C. Heath publishers in Boston.2 Her maternal uncle, Charles Carleton Coffin, a wellknown Civil War journalist, was also an important figure in her life. Musically gifted, Ames Mead became a piano teacher, so she was able to earn her own living. She took advantage of her independence to pursue her own interests— literature, the arts, and philosophy.3 Remaining single until 1898, she married a friend of her brother whom she had known for many years: a like-minded thinker and activist, Edwin Doak Mead. Ames Mead was introduced to the educator-philosopher William Torrey Harris by her brother Charles when she was a teenager. Charles had been impressed with Harris’s writings in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and began a correspondence. Lucia began corresponding with Harris herself and reading philosophy under his direction in the 1870s. Years later, she regularly invited him to be a featured speaker in the lecture series she directed in Boston.



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The world of ideas was clearly something that Ames Mead thrived within and valued. She began to study Kant and Hegel in her early twenties, writing to William Torrey Harris for guidance. Yet as the years passed it became clear that, while she was tempted to pursue purely academic work in philosophy, it was more important to her to put ideas to use to address real-world problems. She became increasingly interested in political philosophy and economic theory, then turned to pacifist theory and activism, which she began in earnest in the late 1890s.4 Her writings make it clear that Ames Mead was familiar with the work of a number of thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Jean de Bloch, Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Like other women in this chapter, she was deeply immersed in the ideas and discussions taking place among her contemporaries and was personally acquainted with many of them: Henry Carter Adams, Jane Addams, Emily Green Balch, Susan Blow, Carrie Chapman Catt, John Dewey, Hamilton Holt, William James, Ellen Key, Marietta Kies, May Wright Sewall, and Caroline K. Sherman. Along with Jane Addams, Ellen Mitchell (discussed in the previous chapter), and Marietta Kies (discussed in volume two), Ames Mead attended sessions of the Concord Summer School of Philosophy in the 1880s, established by William Torrey Harris. Ames Mead and Kies also attended the more applied Plymouth School of Ethics in the 1890s, coordinated by Henry Carter Adams, a political economics professor at the University of Michigan. She became enamored with Kant’s Theory of Perpetual Peace and was a core member of the antiwar movement at the turn of the twentieth century, writing numerous books, pamphlets, and articles on pacifist theory, pedagogy, and political activism, including: “A Primer of the Peace Movement” (1904), Patriotism and the New Internationalism (1906), “Patriotism and Peace: How to Teach Them in the Schools” (1910), Swords and Ploughshares (1912), The Overthrow of the War System (1915), and Law or War (1928). Unlike many peace activists who were disillusioned by the First World War, Ames Mead remained a pacifist

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during and after the war. In fact, she made an even stronger stance for peace after the conflict, calling for US support of the effort to establish a world court and an international system for arbitration. A feminist, Ames Mead was a founding member of the Women’s Peace Party (1915) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1922). In collaboration with May Wright Sewall and Jane Addams, she was a chief organizer and speaker at a number of women’s peace conferences in the early twentieth century, the largest of which was the 1915 international conference in San Francisco, “Women, World War, and Permanent Peace.” Ames Mead’s arguments on behalf of peace were not maternalistic. She was instead a liberal feminist who argued for pacifism from a pragmatic and humanistic point of view. The connection between feminism and pacifism for her was social/ political. Women may have more of an understanding of the damage caused by war and thus more motivation to work for peace. But this is because of their position relationally, as wives, mothers, daughters, or sisters of the war dead, or due to their role socially, as teachers of the next generation. Ames Mead did not assert that there is anything inherent in their nature as women that predisposes them to pacifism.

The Evolution of American Pacifism In 1895, the businessman Albert Smiley organized a meeting to promote peace and international arbitration at his resort in the Catskill Mountains, which began to take place annually and came to be known as the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration. Ames Mead was invited to the conference in 1897 and presented a paper on educating the public about peace advocacy. From that point on, she committed herself to pacifism— particularly to the practical, diplomatic ways of attaining and sustaining peace in an increasingly complex world. Ames Mead became more than an activist, however. She became a pacifist theorist whose ideas were grounded in Kant’s Theory of Perpetual Peace. The Mohonk conferences provided an appropriate



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venue for her to develop her theory, and over time she came to favor a realist approach to peace with international arbitration as its central focus. The pacifist movement in America had been initiated far earlier—in 1815, with the founding of peace organizations in New York and Massachusetts, by David Low Dodge and Noah Webster, respectively. In 1828, William Ladd established the first national organization of this sort, the American Peace Society. The movement was soon populated by religiously minded people who objected to violence in any form, and preached a doctrine of nonresistance— that is, absolute nonviolence even when under attack. During the period of Indian removals and the war against Mexico, peace activists continued to take an absolutist stance, denouncing US imperialism and aggression. The Civil War presented more of a dilemma for pacifists. Many believed that an evil as great as slavery might be one of the few injustices that could justify a war. Following the Civil War, some pacifists became strategic militarists: War had indeed been the only way to end slavery, and the sacrifice was worth it. Others became converts to a stronger sense of pacifism, because they had been so horrified by the killing of Americans by Americans as a means of ending the violence of slavery. By the 1870s, there were several different strains of pacifism in the United States. Religious pacifists often continued to embrace absolute nonresistance. Modified versions of religious pacifism accepted violence in cases of selfdefense for individuals and modifications of just war theory for nations. Julia Ward Howe embraced a feminist pacifism, issuing her “mother’s day for peace” proclamation in 1870. Other forms of pacifism began to develop as well. The brand that Lucia Ames Mead and her colleagues espoused was a “practical” pacifism, which focused on establishing (a) rules for diplomacy, (b) methods for engagement when there is a conflict between nations, and (c) a system of international arbitration in the event that nations reach the brink of war. The Mohonk participants with whom Ames Mead began to work in 1897 were largely business people and intellectuals who wanted to help establish and

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encourage diplomatic ways to achieve peace. They were not idealists—in the philosophical or common sense of that term. Nor were they religionists who envisioned a holy day in which all armed conflicts would miraculously cease. The key to a peaceful world for Ames Mead and her newfound colleagues was to establish both a world court and an international alliance of nations—what would become the League of Nations, and later the United Nations. Ames Mead knew Kant’s Perpetual Peace well, as did others in the peace-througharbitration movement. In fact, the publisher Hamilton Holt, who was active in the peace movement beginning in the 1890s, cited Kant in his 1915 address to the American Branch of the League to Enforce Peace.5 Ames Mead and her colleagues used Kant’s theory as essentially a template for the pacifism they embraced. Ames Mead devoted many of the pages she wrote about peace to practical concerns: the errors and abuses of policy makers who support war, the immense cost of armaments and preparations for war, the physical damage and pain caused by war. Yet, there are theoretical discussions within her most significant works: Patriotism and the New Internationalism (1906), Swords and Ploughshares (1912), and Law or War (1928). In each of these works, Ames Mead notes the importance of educating children and young adults about the theory and practice of pacifism, but this issue is front and center in Patriotism and the New Internationalism. She opens the work by defining patriotism, debunking the myth that the ultimate act of loyalty to one’s country consists of sacrificing one’s life for it in time of war. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of the day-to-day commitment and sacrifice it takes to contribute to the betterment of our local communities: Teach the child that the farmer, the miller, the baker, the doctor, the nurse, and the health board, the fireman, the policeman, the teacher, preacher, and mother are serving their country—even more than the man who makes guns or uses them. Teach [children] that these men and women are fighting the famine, fire, disease, ignorance, and sin, which are the only real enemies



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we have and are vastly more destructive than any foe that ever threatened us in arms. 6 These are the “moral equivalents of war”—causes to which we can commit ourselves that serve human beings in positive, not negative, ways.7 Ames Mead wrote these words in response to a movement that was afoot in the United States in the early twentieth century—to instruct children in the use and maintenance of guns in school. Ames Mead found the idea appalling. She also believed it to be cynical and defeatist in that it belies a belief that violence and war are inevitable. She, along with Addams and their male colleague, William James, believed that instead we can channel individual energies away from violence and national energies away from war, if we focus on the needs of our communities and our nations. In Ames Mead’s view, war could be a thing of the past—a pre-democratic institution that may have actually played some necessary role in history but is now outdated. She points to a far-preferable alternative to teaching children about gun use: curricular initiatives in both America and Europe that teach students the elements of pacifist ideals and practices, so they can become the peacemakers of the future. Toward this end, she developed peace curricula herself, for children and youth at all levels of education. And, like so many educators in her era, she outlined the stages at which to educate children in this arena. Very young children must be taught to care for those close to them, to do kind deeds simply for the sake of it. But they must be intimately connected to those for whom they do these deeds, so their bonds of affection will lead them to experience pleasure in serving others. As children grow, they can see the benefits of altruistic action outside their immediate circle of friends and family, to the neighborhood and community at large. By the adolescent years, youth can be introduced to the facts and figures that illustrate the scale and scope of the damage caused by war. Once students reach the college level, they will be prepared to study negotiation and arbitration and be prepared to put those skills to use.

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Ames Mead addressed big-picture political issues in both Patriotism and the New Internationalism and Swords and Ploughshares, tying antiimperialism to her pacifist stance. She noted that there are some instances in which American and European ventures in the developing world have helped improve economic and social conditions in a given region. Yet, overall imperialism has been nothing more than a form of domination and violence. World leaders who value military and economic power more than humanistic concerns seem to have “forgotten that Moses or St. Paul had ever affected human wills; that Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg, Watt, and Morse had done anything to emancipate man from the brute limitations in time and space and experience; that Homer, Shakespeare, Phidias, Raphael, Beethoven, and ten thousand other God-gifted beings had wrought miracles and lifted millions on their shoulders.”8 The solution to ending the global cycles of imperial dominance and violence that we have seen throughout history is to overcome the “anarchical international condition” that “occasions the exhibitions of greed, arrogance and injustice” around the world.9 World governments must establish a rational system of international cooperation to make and maintain peace. She called for world bodies to mediate when disagreements arise between nations (what became the World Court at the Hague). She also urged for a means for engagement among nations to help prevent disputes from arising in the first place (what would become the League of Nations in Ames Mead’s lifetime and later the United Nations). The concept of rationality runs throughout all of Ames Mead’s work. In fact, she was nearly as critical of utopian, peace-and-love versions of pacifism that relied on emotion as she was of avid militarism. In both cases, the element of rationality was missing and failed to avert the real-life perils that thousands of people faced in wartime. There has been much ineffective talk about brotherly love, relegating it to some far-off day for the end of war. It confounds disputes with war.



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Disputes, racial, financial, religious, and national, will break out for an indefinite time. . . . Our problem is to settle these disputes when they arise even more than to prevent their arising. Shall it be by conciliation or judicial decision, or shall it be by explosives destroying conscripts who on both sides are . . . innocent?10 Ames Mead worked out her more practical brand of pacifism in a four-phase theory: (a) peace as internationalism, (b) peaceful action as patriotism, (c) absolute rejection of war as an option; (d) peace through education. Of the four, phases one and four stand out as the most significant for Ames Mead. They also most clearly demonstrate her appropriation of Kant’s theory. Peace, altruism, and internationalism were almost inextricably linked for Ames Mead. She sharply criticized the common notion of patriotism as nationalistic pride. This is a phenomenon she had seen expressed in American xenophobia as waves of immigrants from Central Europe and the Mediterranean came to the United States, and one that was also increasingly present in the Balkan region as pre-First World War tensions were percolating. She insisted that nationalism is a misguided ideal of patriotism, because it is based on nothing but hatred and fear of the Other (as we would say today) in order to heighten our image of our nation and ourselves. Less surprised than repulsed by this phenomenon, Ames Mead acknowledged that patriotism had been “confounded with [nationalistic] pride and prejudice, bragging and bunting and relic-hunting.”11 Her intent was to help reshape, or even to redefine, the meaning of the word “patriotism” so that it represented not simply the willingness to go to war (or “to kill Spaniards” as one child offered when asked to define the word)12 but instead a deep commitment to bettering the plight of others. Clearly, Ames Mead was steeped in the progressive tradition in aiming for this ideal—as was her colleague Jane Addams and their male associates, John Dewey and William James in their theoretical and practical efforts to make the world a better place. Yet, Ames Mead did not simply come up with a pie in the sky notion. A classic Machiavellian move when a nation is suffering

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from internal discord is to focus on (or even create if need be) an enemy, thus diverting attention away from problems at home. Domestic problems do not disappear, of course, when the populace stops looking at the issues at hand— they simply slip out of focus. Once the diversion is over, the people in this nation have the unseemly task of trying to readdress a problem that has been ignored and may even have worsened over time. Thus, the Machiavellian move does not solve the problem but merely buys time. Ames Mead’s critique is that when patriotism is mixed with militarism, it too often leads to demonizing others and relying on hatred of them to build internal cohesion within a nation. It is merely a façade that masks a vacuum in national consciousness. What each nation needs then, she thought, is not a national egoism disguised as individual sacrifice in war for love of nation, but a genuine and lasting sense of duty for each other as individuals and for the society as a whole. Ames Mead and Addams agreed on this point. Work of this kind calls for a deep commitment to the social good and is a higher form of patriotism. Ames Mead’s vision for patriotic behavior extended to the cosmopolitanism that Kant addressed in Perpetual Peace. Both she and Addams were encouraged by and enthusiastic about the proliferation of international congresses and voluntary organizations in their time, meeting to collaborate on everything from agricultural production to educational theory to the application of Kant’s theory of peace. Ames Mead drew on the American experience after the destruction of the Civil War to underscore the promise and value of this new development: Today, the citizens of all our states and of every land need a like emancipation from an outgrown theory which would make them set apart any fraction of the globe and say, . . . “I am first of all a Russian, or a Frenchman, a German or an American.” . . . [Each of us is] first of all a human being, a citizen of the world, one member in a brotherhood which includes mankind.13 An understanding of the individual as a member of the world community motivated both Ames Mead and Addams. And this accounts for why they



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both believed so strongly that a world body, organized around the idea of ensuring lasting peace around the globe, would ultimately succeed in at least alleviating the damage done by war—and perhaps of making war a thing of the past. Addams had seen multicultural cooperation work in microcosm in and through her work with immigrant communities in Chicago. Both women had seen the dynamism of multicultural discourse at international conferences on peace. The same principles and practices could certainly be successful on a global scale. A strength of Ames Mead’s work was that she simply refused to accept the common notions of political right, just war, and international conflict, which in turn led to a view that warfare is inevitable. Instead, she redefined the terms “war” and “peace,” reinforced the idea that political “right” cannot take precedence over humanitarian good when mediating conflicts, rejected the idea that any war could be truly just, and insisted that systems of mediation can make international conflicts nonviolent and manageable, if not obsolete. Hers was a philosophical model that would later be given credibility by the twentieth century’s most famous pacifists, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, whose practice of nonviolent resistance taught the world something new about the limits of political dominance and the power of peaceful, resourceful community action. In regard to women’s philosophy and political/social theory, Ames Mead’s concern with education is important. A number of women in this volume grounded their philosophy in pedagogy after all. And as noted, pedagogical theory was one of the main branches of philosophy through which women entered the discipline in earlier periods of time. Therefore, this aspect of Ames Mead’s work represents an important strain of thought that can and should be considered more prominent than it often is. Furthermore, her ideas have real potential for being applied today. What if pacifism is one of the virtues that can be taught? The curricula she developed nearly a century ago, then, might indeed hold promise for us as we address our contemporary problems with violence, both at home and around the globe.

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Jane Addams Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a white upper-middle-class woman, the eighth of nine children born to John and Sarah (Weber) Addams in Cedarville, Illinois. Her mother died in childbirth when Addams was just a toddler. Her father was a successful businessman who was involved in local politics and had been on friendly terms with Abraham Lincoln. Aware that she benefitted a great deal from the economic and social privilege she had been born into, Addams attended Rockford Seminary with a sense of mission. She floundered for a time after graduating in 1881, however, and, like many young adults in the upper classes, went to Europe to see the world. She was inspired by the “social settlement” work she saw at Toynbee Hall in London and decided to embark on a similar experiment when she returned to the United States. She founded Hull House, a settlement house for immigrants and indigent people in Chicago in 1889, and this is the work for which she is best known. Addams now holds an important place in American intellectual history, one that has been recognized as both pragmatic and feminist in recent decades, thanks to the work of Charlene Seigfried who first brought Addams’s work as a philosopher to light.14 She was a significant thinker and social activist who addressed a good many social and political issues—on both the practical and theoretical levels. Addams joined Ames Mead in exploring pacifism, and the two agreed on many theoretical aspects of it. Together, she and Ames Mead represent an important strain in American thought: a feminist pacifism that is theoretically based but aimed toward action. To say that Addams had an extensive network of friends and colleagues is an understatement. In the world of progressive theory and activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly everybody knew Jane Addams. She hosted numerous thinkers and activists as Hull House residents and volunteers. She reached across lines of race to support the interests of African American men and women, working with Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett over the years. She also applauded



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the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. She reached across religious boundaries to develop ties with Jewish men and women, serving as the president of the Ethical Culture Society for a time. She worked with immigrants and low-income people to shore up education and provide adequate social services in the city of Chicago. She delivered numerous lectures and published several books. The works that are of interest for the purposes of this study are Addams’s Newer Ideals of Peace (1906) and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), with the first being the more theoretical of the two works. As noted earlier, Addams shared many of Ames Mead’s ideas and ideals in regard to peace. The elements of her thought that are distinctive, however, demonstrate that Addams’s philosophical orientation truly was pragmatic, rather than idealist. She opens Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), with a criticism of common approaches to peace, characterized by Tolstoy’s “pity/compassion” argument (focusing on the pain and suffering caused by war), on the one hand, and by de Bloch’s “prudence” argument (focusing on the costliness of arming nations), on the other. Yet both are misguided. Addams asserts that we need to go well beyond the “pity” or “prudence” arguments for peace. We need to reconfigure what is truly in the interests of (a) the individual in a diverse society and (b) the nation-state in our global society. As a member of a cohort of women philosopher-activists in this era, with this argument Addams takes what I like to call the “genealogy of women’s thought” to a new and socially/ politically significant level—giving women’s ideas impact on a global scale. As previously noted, Addams asserted that identifying “moral substitutes for war” is essential in the effort to transform individual goals and ideals into altruistic action for the common, national good. Similarly, we need a new ideal to transform the natural, egoistic goals of a nation into altruistic, international goals that will benefit people throughout the globe. This aspiration was embraced by many women in Addams’s circle. At the 1915 Women’s International Peace Congress in San Francisco, for instance, May Wright Sewall made a moving and loudly applauded speech that echoes these

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ideas. Recognizing the needs and interests of others in the “American melting pot,” Sewall said, is a model for diversity and cultural interchange among people throughout the world.15 In such a society, setting aside egoistic goals for the good of all can and should become second nature, especially in the United States—a society that recognizes and celebrates its diversity. (Using such terms as “diversity” puts a contemporary twist on this historical period, but one that I think is appropriate, given the intellectual mood, political progressivism, and social idealism of Addams and her colleagues.) Addams agreed with this view and devoted many pages to it in Newer Ideals of Peace, describing the immigrant experience in an effort to demonstrate that modern urban centers are a microcosm of the world community. “The immigrant situation would indicate that all the peoples of the world have become part of the American tribunal, and that their sense of pity, their clamor for personal kindness, their insistence upon the right to join in our progress, can no longer be disregarded.” She continues, “It is but necessary to make this fellowship wider, to extend its scope without lowering its intensity. . . . There is something active and tangible in this new internationalism.”16 The task of the peacemaker, then, is to listen, observe, and value the experiences of those on the margins of society—in Addams’s context, specifically immigrants and women who at that point had not yet won the right to vote. The task of not only activists, but all members of society, she says, is to recognize this “active and tangible” internationalism and become engaged in community work on the local level. Concerned citizens should turn their energies toward providing social services, ensuring healthy diets, facilitating communication, and securing fair and equal political participation. Calling upon the religious prophetic tradition that was still common among progressives in this era, Addams said she and fellow activists could help usher in the day when “swords would finally be beaten into plowshares and pruning-hooks, not because men resolved to be peaceful, but because all the metal of the earth would be turned to its proper use when the poor and their children should be abundantly fed.”17 She continues on



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this line of thought and closes Newer Ideals of Peace by looking forward to the day when “peace is no longer an abstract dogma, but has become a rising tide of moral enthusiasm, slowly engulfing all pride of conquest and making war impossible.”18

Ida B. Wells-Barnett Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) is best known as a journalist who drew attention to the horrors of lynching during the “Jim Crow” era in United States.19 She was also a public intellectual and women’s rights activist. Wells-Barnett was the daughter of James and Elizabeth Wells, both of whom had been born into slavery. They and their children lived in Holly Springs, Mississippi, when Ida was born during the Civil War. After the war, the Wells children studied at Shaw University (now Rust College), one of the first “freedmen’s schools” in the South. Students of all ages and skill levels studied at Shaw, and WellsBarnett often recognized the “consecrated” whites who provided instruction at the school.20 Her education was truncated due to the death of her parents in a yellow fever epidemic, but she read widely and studied on her own. Later she took advantage of summer education programs at Fisk University. Unlike many women who pursued a career before the mid-twentieth century, WellsBarnett was married and had four children. Well ahead of her time in so many ways, she chose to hyphenate her name when she married. Her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, was a successful lawyer, one of the first men of color to hold a state attorney’s position in Illinois. Accounts of the life of Ida B. Wells-Barnett make it clear that she was familiar with the work of important literary figures, like Shakespeare, Dante, Schiller, and the Brontë sisters. She was also fully versed in the Bible and appealed to Christian morality to make her case for social justice. Well acquainted with a number of contemporaries who were also thinkers and activists, Wells-Barnett had personal relationships with many of them—some of whom appear in this

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volume: Jane Addams; Susan B. Anthony; Anna Julia Cooper; Fanny Jackson Coppin and her husband, Rev. Levi Coppin, editor of the well-respected African Methodist Episcopal Review; Frederick Douglass; W. E. B. DuBois; Frances Watkins Harper; Garland Penn; Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin; Mary Church Terrell; Fanny Barrier Williams and her husband, Laing Williams, a prominent attorney; Lillian Wald; Booker T. Washington and his wife, Margaret Murray Washington; Carter G. Woodson; and Josephine Silone Yates. For Ida B. Wells-Barnett, intellectual life was meaningless, if not aimed toward action. Though she was deeply involved in the women’s club movement in the 1890s, she grew tired of groups that did not engage in activism, scoffing and referring to them as “do-nothings.”21 Given the unthinkable acts of racist violence she had chronicled as a journalist, it is no wonder. Although there were more women journalists in North America in this era than one might expect, Wells-Barnett became one of the best-known women to engage in investigative journalism in the United States.22 Preceding her among African American women in the world of news reporting were Maria Stewart, discussed in the previous chapter, the first woman of color known to contribute to a white-owned periodical, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first woman of color to serve as editor of a newspaper that challenged racial injustice, The Provincial Freeman. Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893) was an important figure in African American life in North America, one who, no doubt, served as a role model for Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Therefore, a sketch of her life and work is merited. Mary Ann was born to Abraham Shadd, the descendant of a Dutch immigrant and Harriet Burton Parnell, a free African American woman who raised their family in Delaware. As laws and policies in southern states and “border states,” like Delaware, became more and more oppressive, the couple moved their large family, several of whom were teenagers or young adults, to Ontario, Canada. They settled between Windsor, just across the border from Detroit, Michigan, to Chatham, Ontario, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) west of Toronto. Mary Ann and her sister, Amelia, established a school. Mary Ann



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also started publishing a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, which addressed social and political issues of interest to the many people of African descent who had escaped racial oppression in the United States. Although she was the sole editor of The Provincial Freeman, Mary Ann published the paper under the name of two male associates, to appease an audience that was not accustomed to women assuming the voice of authority. After the death of her husband, Thomas Cary, Mary Ann returned to the United States to help recruit soldiers for service in the Civil War. She resumed teaching when the war had ended, settling in Washington, D.C., where she was among a number of prominent educators and activists. After a few years, she enrolled at Howard University and became the first woman of African descent to earn a law degree in the United States. Women like Mary Ann Shadd Cary helped clear the way for her younger contemporaries as they sought to make their voices heard. Born during the Civil War, Wells-Barnett had no memories of life under slavery, but she was acutely aware of her parents’ experiences, and the stories they recounted certainly influenced her. As was all too common, Ida’s mother was sold away from her family in Virginia and had experienced violence at the hand of her masters in Mississippi. The experience of Wells-Barnett’s father was quite different. The only child of his white master, he was never victimized himself. Yet he saw his mother beaten the day after his father died, and the reason was clear: the man’s widow resented her late husband’s relationship with his slave mistress and commanded the beating. Following the Civil War, Ida’s parents readily made the transition from slavery to freedom. James was a skilled carpenter who contributed to the rebuilding of their war-ravaged town. Yellow fever took the lives of her parents and a baby brother, however. Wells-Barnett was only a teenager, but she succeeded in convincing would-be guardians that she could run the household and take care of her five younger siblings. She managed this way for a year or two, but in the early 1880s her severely disabled sister died, and her brothers were assigned to apprenticeships. She and her two youngest sisters remained together, moving to Memphis in 1883 with an aunt’s assistance.

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Wells-Barnett is yet another woman who started her career as a teacher. Late in life, she made a point of saying that she never enjoyed teaching, although she always did her best work in each position she held.23 She began writing articles for church newsletters and local news outlets in the African American community, and by the mid-1880s, she was able to make a living as a writer. In 1889, she joined Rev. F. Nightingale and F. J. Fleming as an equal partner and editor of a Memphis newspaper, The Free Speech.24 She discussed a range of issues relevant to the African American community and did so with passion. In 1892, however, an event took place that “changed the whole course of my life,” in Wells-Barnett’s words.25 A longtime friend, Thomas Moss, was one of three business owners in Memphis who had been murdered in a racist attack. He had become embroiled in a conflict that had literally grown out of a children’s quarrel in front of his grocery store. With threats to destroy the store looming and credible warnings that he and his business partners would have no police protection, Moss and colleagues decided to defend the store themselves. An altercation ensued in which two white men were shot. The rest of the story is filled with all the horrors that Ida B. Wells-Barnett would campaign against throughout her career. Moss and his associates were arrested and jailed, but were apprehended by a mob of white men in masks that night, dragged out of the jail, and driven to a remote location where all three were beaten and shot to death.26 Wells-Barnett was very close to Thomas Moss and his family. In fact, she was the godmother of Moss’s daughter, Maurine. Seeing him, a friend and successful leader in the African American community, lost to racist violence was simply devastating. For years, instances of vigilante justice against African Americans had been explained away as anomalous outbursts of rage that had been triggered by heinous acts of violence—usually rape or murder. This time Wells-Barnett knew that was not the case. She began investigating other lynching cases and fired off an article about these tragedies, charging that they were incidents of racist violence. She also charged that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women.” She then



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strongly implied what she later would declare outright—that white women sometimes claimed they had been raped when they had actually been in a consensual relationship with an African American man: “A conclusion [may] be reached,” she said, “which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of [these] women.”27 When her article was published, white-owned news outlets expressed outrage. One called Wells-Barnett a “black scoundrel” who has “uttered such loathsome and repulsive calumnies” that even allowing her to live among them is “evidence of the wonderful patience of Southern whites.” But, the author concluded, “We have had enough of it.”28 A white mob destroyed the offices of The Free Speech and would likely have lynched Fleming, WellsBarnett’s business partner, if he had not evaded capture. She was in New York at the time on a previously scheduled trip and was cautioned by friends—both black and white—not to return to Memphis. Aggressors were lying in wait for her, with some stationed at train depots to apprehend her if she returned. She heeded her friends’ advice, in part to reduce the possibility that her associates and family members in Memphis would become victims of additional violence. But she continued to do the work to which she was now devoted—activism in and through journalism. She was committed to chronicling the persecution and abuse experienced by blacks in the form of lynching, with claims of blackon-white violence, and rape in particular, as a pretext. When Wells-Barnett began investigating the lynching crisis, violence against African Americans was at its height, with 241 documented lynchings in 1892 alone—an average of twenty each month.29 Her goals were to make the horrors of lynching visible to a large audience, to educate her readers about the racism behind vigilantism in the American South, and ultimately to bring lynching to an end. “The people must know,” she said, “before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”30 Within this social/political activism, elements of critical race theory, feminist criticism, and political/legal theory are apparent in Wells-Barnett’s work. Wells-Barnett participated in two intellectual traditions that many thinkers have characterized as quintessentially “American”—prophetic witness31 and

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pragmatism—or a subspecies of it, which I will call a philosophy of activism. The first is a tradition she consciously developed. She was a woman of color from the southern United States, and prophetic witness was a well-established tradition within African American culture, originating under the oppressive slave system. She called on principles of justice and Christian morality to bolster her arguments and inspire her audience. In this sense, her work is like Maria Stewart, who frequently spoke in the prophetic voice. The second, philosophy of activism, has emerged in contemporary academic philosophy in recent years.32 With academic boundaries not as clearly drawn as they are today, ideas and action were more closely allied in Ida B. WellsBarnett’s time. Though she did not use the term “philosophy of activism” herself, her application of ideas to practical social/political concerns most certainly qualifies as such. Following some of the more high-profile lynching cases, Wells-Barnett wrote articles urging members of the African American community to take action. She urged them to band together, to speak and act as one, to resist racist practices, or to defy racist policies. Following the murder of Thomas Moss, for instance, she encouraged people of color to leave Memphis behind, reminding her readers that before he died Moss had said, “Tell my people to go to West—there is no justice for them here.”33 In later years, she used the power of the press to urge for activism. She refused to sit idle waiting for “hearts and minds” to change. Instead, she encouraged people of color to recognize and claim their power in order to bring an end to injustice and hasten along reforms. A careful look at her work demonstrates that she had a good deal of faith in the principles of freedom, democracy, and justice as a means to achieve equality across race, class, and culture. Wells-Barnett encouraged her audience to disseminate the facts she had gathered about lynching, to denounce it and demand that others do the same. On the community level, she implored readers to join local chapters of organizations, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the YMCA, or religious groups and social clubs—and within them to propose resolutions and protest injustice. In the political arena, she urged for support of the bill



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sponsored by Senator Henry Blair that would investigate and address vigilante violence wherever it occurred.34 Finally, Wells-Barnett promoted boycotts. Let the racist businesses and politicians see a decline in revenue, she said, since they seem to value the economy more than human lives: “The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience. . . . By the exercise of [economic] power, the Afro-American can demand and secure his rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a fair trial for accused rapists.”35 The biggest challenge Wells-Barnett had to face in her struggle to end vigilantism, however, was precisely the last item on that list: a fair trial for accused rapists. Whites throughout the United States had been accepting lynchers’ claims that the men they killed were violent predators whose guilt was undeniable. Law enforcement and the political establishment routinely backed up those claims and sometimes added that, in most cases they were powerless to hold back the rage that was natural and justifiable whenever a rape occurred. Mobs spontaneously gathered, officials said. In a righteous fervor, they took justice into their own hands by seizing the despised criminal and ending his life. It was simply impossible to hold them back. Wells-Barnett collected data that disproved such claims, however. She found that—time after time—accusations of rape or murder were vague or contrived. Evidence was not gathered by local officials, let alone evaluated. Formal legal charges were rarely filed, and law enforcement protocols were ignored. In addition, at times law enforcement and local governments passively stood by as mobs amassed, doing little or nothing to stop them. At other times, local police and politicians conspired with the lynch mob or were even members of it. Finally, Wells-Barnett found that lynching was not always a spontaneous outburst of violence, but instead was a carefully orchestrated plan. On several occasions, an easily accessible venue was chosen and excursion trains were run to allow a large crowd to gather—and in broad daylight. Parents brought their children, hoisting them up on their shoulders to better witness the violence. Wells-Barnett ruefully commented on this phenomenon at one point, saying

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parental decisions like this must be “calculated to drive sleep from the child’s eyes . . . if not to produce permanent injury to [their] nervous system.”36 Supposedly genteel young women of virtue would vie for a good view. Cheering and audience participation would ensue. In some cases, the crowd even sought out relics from among the remains.37 In short, Wells-Barnett discovered that the practice of lynching was far more horrifying than most (white) people knew and that “colored men and women are lynched for almost any offense.”38 She was determined to publicize these harsh realities, educate a wide audience, and build a movement dedicated to stopping it. The theoretical aspects of Wells-Barnett’s work can escape a casual reader. Like Lucia Ames Mead, she has been known as a journalist—work she felt driven to do, because of the racism she had observed and experienced. In this sense, journalism provided a path in which theories and action converged. As a journalist, she could explore issues and ideas related to race, gender, and identity (black and white; male and female) while also increasing public awareness of racial injustice, educating her readers about its causes and cures, and urging for political and legal changes to eradicate racism. In a closer reading of her work, however, themes begin to emerge amid the case studies and statistics she provides: the rape myth as a pretext to justify vigilante justice, racist ideologies behind that myth, racialized understandings of feminine virtue, philosophy of activism. With the publication of her collection of articles about lynching, Southern Horrors, Wells-Barnett exposed the “rape myth” that was used to justify mob violence against African Americans. She had found that in the vast majority of cases, there were actually no claims of rape or physical assault of any kind. Instead, any excuse could be used to justify vigilante violence—a minor infraction, an innuendo, or circumstantial evidence. Formal legal procedures— if there were any—were generally a sham, and local authorities often gave a nod of approval to lynch mobs and/or colluded in their efforts. In chronicling the details of lynching as an abuse of justice, Wells-Barnett hoped to increase awareness of the problem, particularly among white liberals in the northern



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United States who had been accepting white southerners’ accounts of lynching at face value. Many white liberals were shocked and horrified by lynching, but had been told the practice was a gut reaction to the equally horrifying acts of rape or murder. And they believed it. Her accounts revealed how inaccurate this portrayal was. She dismantled the rape myth; demonstrated how far-reaching the abuses of justice were; and examined the dynamics of race, gender, and power that were behind the myth. While dismantling the rape myth, Wells-Barnett was clear to say that rape is among the most heinous of crimes. In today’s terms, we recognize it as a violation of bodily integrity and personal self-possession. In the late nineteenth century, however, the crime of rape was far more closely related to a woman’s virtue and the violation of another man’s rights to her body than it was to the sense of individuality and autonomy we value today. White southerners’ claim was that they needed to protect white women from black men, who were portrayed as predators, “a race of rapists and desperados.”39 Wells-Barnett parodies the images their rhetoric conjured—“a roving Negro ruffian . . . watching and waiting” around virtually every corner to violate innocent and unsuspecting white women.40 In reality, however, she gathered evidence to show that in nearly all the lynching cases in which there actually was sexual contact, white women sought out black men or accepted their attention. She cited several high-profile cases in which women were clearly in consensual relationships with black men: A minister’s wife in Ohio lied about her relationship with a hired man when she feared she was pregnant. Overcome with guilt, she confessed to the affair and the man was released from prison. Wells-Barnett notes that in a southern state, the man most certainly would have been killed.41 A man discovered his teenage daughter visiting her lover in his room. That young man was jailed, beaten, and lynched by a mob.42 A pair of young adults who carried on a clandestine romance met for months in a secluded area. When the liaison was discovered, the man was jailed, but with no resistance from authorities, was taken from the jailhouse, beaten, and burned alive. His lover was forced to light the fire while he pleaded with her, “You’d do this to me

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after we been sweethearting for so long?”43 Another married woman claimed to have been raped after being caught in an adulterous affair with a man of color. Like the minister’s wife, she had a change of heart and emerged from her home, where a crowd had gathered to see the lynching. She asked if there was any way the man could be spared. Getting a negative response, she returned to the house to retreat from the horrors her lover could not escape and silently closed the door.44 In each of these cases, there were two dynamics at play: First, white men’s claim to “protect” white women, when in actuality they were “claiming” women’s sexuality for themselves, owning women’s body, soul, and cultural identity, and second, white women’s betrayal of their lovers—or at least their failure to be responsible for their own actions. In the first case, when white men went into a fury over an “outrage” against a white woman (which we have seen Wells-Barnett discovered had rarely, if ever, taken place), they claimed to be protecting her virtue. But Wells-Barnett’s critique makes it clear that they were asserting themselves, not simply as protectors, but as proprietors of white women. She charged that white men seemed to assume they had a right to be the proprietors of women of color as well.45 As she points out, the virtue of black women had repeatedly been compromised under slavery, and this had continued to be the case in the post-slavery era. She chronicles a number of abuses against black women that are just as horrifying as they are heartbreaking: the gang rape of a young woman who was out walking with her boyfriend; young girls raped by white men with no investigation, trial, or penalty; family members punished for revealing the rape of girls or women of color.46 The failure to address abuses against women and girls of African descent reveals evidence of a schizophrenic understanding of feminine virtue—or more accurately, a racist concept of virtue. According to the narrative that was constructed to justify lynching, white women’s virtue is sacrosanct and white men’s honor inviolable. A comparable understanding of the virtue or honor



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of women and men of color? In the racist mind, both were nonexistent. Yet Wells-Barnett reminded her audience that “virtue knows no color line.”47 The second dynamic at play in the cases Wells-Barnett brought to light is white women’s betrayal of the African American men they (would have) loved. This is a key feature of many of the tragedies she shared. Rather than take responsibility for their own actions, white women made false charges of rape or allowed their family to do so, in order to escape public shame—and perhaps public punishment. Only in a few cases did a white woman refuse to disclose the name of her lover. Wells-Barnett seemed to find it surprising when this happened and even remarkable that one white woman claimed she had African heritage herself, rather than put the father of her child at risk.48 What today’s feminists will underscore in this critique is that white men sought to dominate and control both white and black women. An act like enlisting a “marked woman” to light the very fire that will burn her lover to death is a powerful way to subjugate and terrorize a person, after all. It is certainly possible that some women in these cases had little true affection for their former partners and callously ignored the deadly consequences of their accusations. But in at least one case, the lynching victim’s lover “was compelled by threats, if not by violence,” to make the charge against him49 and forced to light the match in this gruesome and violent ritual. It is likely that this experience was at least as sickening to the women whose lovers were killed as it was to WellsBarnett’s readers. Wells-Barnett knew Frederick Douglass quite well and borrowed his analysis of the evolution of racist ideology in the South, which in turn was used to justify lynching—a valuable contribution to the development of critical race theory in the United States. During the era of slavery, Douglass said, white southerners “owned the Negro, body and soul.”50 At that time, it was in the interests of whites to ensure their slaves were in good physical condition, which led them to draw at least some limits on the level and degree of corporal punishment they inflicted. When slavery ended, so did the incentive for whites to preserve the bodies of African American fellow citizens. This led to a series

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of white justifications for oppression, which Douglass said evolved over time. First was the claim that former slaves were not capable of self-rule and lacked the education and cultural understanding to make positive contributions to society. This developed into a notion that, as the cultural majority, “the white man must rule,” which resulted in stripping African Americans of their rights to gain equal education and employment and to vote—in short to achieve substantive social and political equality. Last came the challenge Wells-Barnett was facing down in her time: the charge that white men must protect “their” women from dangerous predators. As noted, this notion played a central role in the development of the rape myth, but it was used to justify vigilante violence in other cases as well.51 Wells-Barnett recounts a number of situations in which a “big, burly negro” was said to have been “ignorant and unruly” or acting dangerously.52 Police action was said to have escalated the situation, and it was rumored that a mob of African Americans was forming. Wells-Barnett identifies these accounts as based on a formula that is informed by racist stereotypes and that characterizes all African American males as a potential threat. Wells-Barnett considered the case of Robert Charles to be especially informative: A man involved in an altercation with police that escalated, Charles was demonized, hunted down in a three-day search, and shot on sight. Wells-Barnett did not suggest that this man was an angel, but she does indicate that he was maligned by the press and by official reports of his conduct. After his death, a news account called him a “fiend incarnate,” for instance, and he was posthumously linked to a previous murder in another state, even though there was simply no evidence he had traveled that far in his lifetime.53 And although leaders of European descent began promoting “recolonization” of people of African descent as early as the 1830s, Robert Charles’s dream of one day traveling to Africa was construed as evidence that he was radical and hostile to white-dominant culture at home. “Charles developed into a fanatic on the subject of Negro oppression and neglected business to indulge in wild tirades wherever he could find a listener,” claimed one white reporter.54 Interviewing



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people who knew Robert Charles, Wells-Barnett learned that he had been busy collecting books and reading periodicals in the effort to “improve himself.” A minister who knew him for the last six years of his life spoke to both his character and his interest in Liberia: He never has, as I know, given any trouble to anyone. He was a quiet and a peaceful man and was very frank in speaking . . . few can be found to equal him. . . . You will find one of the circulars of which Charles was in possession, which was styled as a crazy document. . . . If you can help circulate this “crazy” doctrine, I would be glad to have you do so, for I shall never rest until I get to that heaven on earth; that is, the west coast of Africa, in Liberia.55 Wells-Barnett’s careful discussion of the Robert Charles case stands as a particularly good example of the ways in which she acted in and through her intersectional experience as a woman of color.56 That is to say, as an African American woman, she spoke not only about the problem of contrasting conceptions of virtue as applied to white and black women, as noted earlier. She also spoke on behalf of and affirmed black men throughout her reports and critical commentary. She saw very clearly that the act of lynching met three specific patriarchal and racist goals, as related to masculinity: It emasculated African American men, individually and as a group. It targeted individual black men in order to instill terror in the African American community. It asserted white male power—over and above black male power. An account of Wells-Barnett’s theory of race and the dismantling of racism would not be complete without her recognition of the value of shared oppressions and cross-cultural cooperation. For instance, she mourns the murder of two Native Americans accused of killing a white woman in Oklahoma, although there was no evidence to be found. Like many African Americans, they too were put through the medieval horror of being burned to death.57 She also cites the support of everyday European-heritage people who refused to contribute to mob violence during a race riot, even when they

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were questioned in court later. For instance, a white New Yorker got into an altercation with would-be vigilantes, telling them that “Negroes are as good as whites.” He repeated his statement under oath in court, for which he received a twenty-five-dollar fine—the equivalent of roughly seven hundred dollars today—or a thirty-day jail sentence. Three other white men were charged with failing to allow officers to pass amid mob violence; two received the same penalty—a twenty-five-dollar fine or thirty days in jail. One was released after it was determined he was disabled.58 Wells-Barnett recognized white authorities who made efforts to intervene when racist violence erupted, but also noted their failures. William McKinley, the governor of Ohio and future president of the United States, successfully fended off a mob that tried to break into the courthouse for their would-be lynching victim. She affirmed his actions, even though several people died in the conflict, saying he reinforced “the principle that law must be upheld.”59 A similar attempt was made by Henry Trout, mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, who called on the local militia to prevent a mob from apprehending an African American man who had been accused of murder. Vigilantes confronted the militia, and several whites were killed. After a period of time, however, the poorly trained militia disbanded. The mob then broke into the jail, and the man was immediately hanged. The perpetrators left the body hanging all day with a note pinned to his body: “This man is Mayor Trout’s friend.”60 Benjamin Tillman, governor of South Carolina, had a more mixed legacy. During his campaign he declared that he personally would applaud the lynching of any African American found guilty of rape. In office, he found himself caught in a terrible dilemma, however, when a man who was clearly innocent was targeted by a lynch mob. Reportedly, Tillman harbored him in the governor’s mansion, but a mob amassed and loomed outside demanding their “prisoner.” Despite the alleged victim’s assertion that he was not the rapist and before witnesses could arrive to confirm the man’s alibi, Tillman gave up on the standoff. Within twenty-four hours, the man was killed, because “a crime had been committed and someone had to hang for it.”61 Wells-Barnett shared this tragic incident



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throughout her writings, noting that, with his affirmation of vigilante justice, Tillman had set the wheels of racist violence in motion—and then found himself unable to stop it. With all the pressures Ida B. Wells-Barnett faced as a public intellectual who confronted the harsh realities of racist violence, it is no surprise that she sought allies. She found many of them among liberal and progressive thinkers, black and white. But she was stunned and bitterly disappointed when the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) failed to endorse her anti-lynching campaign. The WCTU was one of the largest women’s organizations and became a worldwide network in the late nineteenth century. Its goal was to stamp out alcohol abuse, and with it—or so its members hoped—bring an end to a wide range of social ills that were spawned by drunkenness: domestic violence, abuse and abandonment of children, infidelity, prostitution, and all other forms of libertinism. As noted in Chapter 3, today the organization seems old, dusty, and prudish, but at the height of its activity, it was considered progressive. Few other voices spoke as directly about social vices and crafted ways to address them in this era, after all. Wells-Barnett fully expected support from the WCTU, but found that she was met with avoidance or rebuffed outright. Finally, she confronted the situation and ignited the ire of the organization’s white leadership in doing so. Wells-Barnett had learned that the organization’s founder and president, Frances Willard, and other white WCTU leaders were reticent to embrace the anti-lynching campaign. First, they did not want to dismiss rape, one of the most heinous crimes against women. Second, they feared alienating white women in the South. Wells-Barnett was outraged. That great Christian body, which in its resolutions had expressed itself in opposition to the social amusement of card play, athletic sports, and . . . dancing; had protested against the licensing of saloons, inveighed against tobacco, pledged its allegiance to the Prohibition party . . . [has now] wholly ignored the seven millions of colored people of this country whose plea was for a word of sympathy and support of the movement in their behalf.62

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The two women exchanged harsh condemnations of each other in the press. Willard gave interviews to defend her position and her honor as a Christian woman. Wells-Barnett criticized her for continuing to dodge responsibility for her failure to recognize the horrendous violence to which African Americans were subject at the hands of blood-thirsty mobs. A number of prominent white leaders rushed to defend Willard. The two women were at an impasse, which they never found a way to overcome. Wells-Barnett shared her frustration with Susan B. Anthony, whom she respected a great deal. In the course of their conversation, Anthony acknowledged that she made the same error in the past. She failed to include women of color in the women’s rights movement for fear of alienating white southerners. When she asked Wells-Barnett if she was wrong to have done so, the younger activist answered forthrightly: yes. At this point in her life (1894), Anthony was more prepared to confront racism than many of her white contemporaries. During Wells-Barnett’s visit to Anthony’s home, for instance, the older woman instructed her secretary to take dictation for their guest, if needed, while Anthony was out for an appointment. At day’s end Anthony learned that her secretary did not follow through, however, saying, “I refuse to take dictation from a colored woman.” Anthony’s response was to fire her on the spot: “You needn’t take any more dictation from me. . . . Come, get your bonnet and go.”63 Wells-Barnett shared these vignettes in her autobiography, and in doing so she held white women responsible for their history of excluding women of color and thus contributing to racism and injustice. At the same time, she gave readers a glimpse of the level of selfawareness of at least one progressive white woman as she reflected on the wrongs she committed in the past. Unfortunately, Wells-Barnett experienced more instances of white betrayal. Celia Parker Woolley, a close friend of Fannie Barrier Williams, joined WellsBarnett in establishing the Frederick Douglass Center, a social reform-minded organization that held mixed-race salon discussions. But when it was time to identify officers to lead the center, Woolley informed Wells-Barnett that



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she believed a white woman should be nominated for office, rather than Ida, her fellow cofounder. Quite likely, like Willard and Anthony, Woolley made this call based on racialized politics on the local level, rather than standing up to confront race bias. Even if Wells-Barnett had the presence of mind to realize this, she refused to accept it. She was angered and hurt by the decision and withdrew her support from the center. In another, more intense, incident years later, white women who led the first major women’s protest for voting rights in Washington, D.C., blocked Wells-Barnett from participating. Amid preparations to march, the president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association rushed in to make an announcement: “The woman in charge of the entire parade has advised us to keep our delegation entirely white, . . . a number of women [from the South and Northeast] had even gone so far as say that they would refuse to march with blacks.” Wells-Barnett responded, unable to hold back tears of anger, “If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade, then the colored women are lost.” In the end, two white allies, Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks, encouraged Wells-Barnett to defy the mandate, pledging to march along with her—which they succeeded in doing.64 Even while weathering storms like these, generally speaking, Ida B. WellsBarnett was a cooperatively minded problem solver. She worked “across the color line,” as she and her colleagues would have said. In fact, she was often eager to establish connections with white women’s clubs and activist networks. As noted, she had great respect for Susan B. Anthony. She also enjoyed the company of Helen Pitts Douglass, the second wife of Frederick Douglass, and applauded their interracial marriage. She worked with a number of white women in Chicago’s social and political reform circles, including prominent figures, like Mary Plummer and Celia Parker Woolley—despite the fact that each had made serious missteps in confronting their own implicit bias. She also worked with Jane Addams and seems to have thought highly of her and her commitments to social reform.

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Quite likely the main reason Wells-Barnett was considered “radical” is that she was unafraid to address racism head on. And in a woman, such a straightforward approach was unfamiliar and unacceptable. It was rare to see a female in investigative journalism; it was even more rare for a woman to take on such horrifying instances of violence. In her day and time, women were expected to shield themselves from such disturbing realities—or better yet to be shielded from them by a male protector. Instead, she refused to be silenced, even in the face of death threats. She also expected—and sometimes demanded—respect, inclusion, and credit for her work. In Ida B. WellsBarnett, we see none of the false humility we saw in Susan Blow; none of the deference we saw in Margaret Mercer; not even the hope-filled pleas of Maria Stewart. She was the first person to file a discrimination lawsuit when forcibly removed from the “white” to the “colored” car of a passenger train—though, sadly, the ruling in her favor was overturned.65 She expressed frustration when passed over for leadership positions in women’s and activist networks or when her tireless campaign to end racial violence was overlooked by the African American historian Carter Woodson.66 These were affronts committed by both white and black colleagues, men and women—probably at least in part because Wells-Barnett’s laser-focus on the lynching crisis was considered a detriment by more moderate colleagues with other concerns and objectives. When discussing the thought of women and minority thinkers, it is tempting to place emphasis on their ideas as related to gender, race/ethnicity, or culture. Given the historical failure of philosophy to recognize how culture bound and devoted it is to its white masculine traditions, it might be preferable to err on the side of emphasizing diversity. The aspects of a thinker’s ideas that relate to nonwhite, non-Western, and non-male experience are an extremely valuable contribution to the discipline, after all. And Wells-Barnett did bring new ideas to the table that have not been emphasized in Western thought, though elements of these ideas certainly have existed since Plato: social/political solidarity as a form of political power, for instance, and the need to put theories into practice. But like many women and minority thinkers, Wells-Barnett engaged in discussions



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of “mainstream” ideas within social/political and legal theory—specifically: egalitarianism, the need for an informed populace, and due process. She did so with the aim of bringing an end to the gross injustices African Americans were subjected to in her time (some would say still), but she also firmly held that these democratic practices were essential to maintain a just society for all.

Luisa Capetillo Luisa Capetillo (1879–1922) was a writer, labor rights activist, and feminist, born to Luis Capetillo Echevarria and Luisa Margarita Perone in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.67 Accounts of her life and her own writings demonstrate that Capetillo was well acquainted with the works of progressive writers, philosophers, and political theorists: Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Voltaire, Auguste Comte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Charles Malato. Although she was a feminist, Capetillo was far more interested in substantive labor rights than in formal political rights. Therefore, she was not active in women’s organizations, does not seem to have attended feminist conferences, and was not involved in the campaign for women’s voting rights. She was aware of the work of her contemporary, the feminist Ana Roqué, however, whose life and work was discussed in Chapter 3. She appreciated Roqué’s work, although she considered her older colleague a bit too moderate. Capetillo had interests in education and could not have escaped encountering the ideas of the prominent Latin American educators and activists Eugenio de Hostos and Salome de Ureña, though I have not discovered evidence that they met or corresponded. Capetillo wrote numerous articles, plays, poems, and short stories, only a portion of which have been translated into English. The ideas discussed in this volume are from a collection of her work, published in both English and Spanish, “Mi opinion sobre las libertades, derechos, and deberes de la mujer” (My opinion on the liberties, rights, and duties of woman), which is considered

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the first feminist treatise in Puerto Rico. In this work, Capetillo discusses a number of social and political issues, among them women’s role in both public and private life and economic justice.68 The only child of common laborers, Capetillo was encouraged to value education. Through most of her childhood, she was tutored at home by her mother, a domestic worker who was well read and often attended salon discussions. As a teenager, she worked alongside her mother cleaning the homes of wealthy families. By the early 1900s, however, she worked at one of the large cigar factories in Arecibo, having secured a position as a reader. The intellectually oriented Capetillo was eager to serve in that role—one that is unfamiliar to us today, though it was common at the time. Her fellow workers paid a small fee to hear her read from great literary and philosophical works throughout the workday. As a result she became a dynamic public speaker. Soon she made the transition from reading these texts in the factories to becoming a writer. She began publishing poetry, fiction, and articles about labor rights and women’s rights in local news outlets. For the first decade of the twentieth century, Capetillo remained in Puerto Rico, becoming deeply involved in labor activism. At times she was subject to beatings and arrests for the prominent role she played in labor rights protests. In fact, she was considered such a rabble-rouser that she was deported from Cuba due to her political activities there in 1916. Between 1912 and her death in 1922, she had opportunities to expand her activist presence and spent alternating periods of time in New York City; Tampa, Florida; Havana, Cuba; and her home base in Puerto Rico. At this point, she continued writing the short-form publications she had become known for while also writing longer essays arguing for women’s rights and fair labor practices—the work that is of interest in this volume. In the opening chapter of “Mi Opinion,” Capetillo appears to have embraced all the traditional views of women that dominated nineteenth-century discourse about gender: “The true mother of a family must know how to do it all, both intellectually and physically,” she declares.69 She must be the keeper of hearth and home and have full command over cleaning and organizational tasks. She



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must be skilled as a seamstress, cook, baker, and hostess. She is her children’s first teacher, so she must attend to their intellectual and moral development. She must be cheerful and pleasant with her husband; if he is abrupt or angry, she must not respond in kind, but with patience and sweetness.70 A casual reader would not be able to determine if the text had been written in 1820, 1920, or sometime in between. Yet, Capetillo quickly incorporates two feminist elements into her discussion of women’s role in the home. First, she charges that men must do their fair share in the household to ensure it runs smoothly, by assuming equal responsibility for childcare and household chores. In addition, she argued for marital fidelity, which she discusses at some length. Like many feminists in her day who dared venture into this topic, Capetillo complained about the sexual double standard for men and women. She recounted the many ways men were allowed to breach their vows to women. She then charged that rigid codes of marital fidelity for women are “an imposed morality and a violent virtue established by tyrants over woman, who for centuries have oppressed her.”71 In her view, a woman is justified in taking a lover or leaving her unfaithful partner in such cases, so she can find true happiness. Capetillo moves from this discussion into arguments and vignettes in praise of free love, a theme that cropped up in feminist circles every generation or so in the nineteenth century. “Free love” was an umbrella term for everything from a simple plea to allow premarital sex to complex arrangements for shortterm polygamous unions.72 Among the best-known female proponents of the free love movement in the United States were Fanny Wright, of the Nashoba utopian community in the 1820s and 1830s; Harriet Worden, of the Oneida Community in the 1850s and 1860s; and Victoria Woodhull, in the 1870s. Capetillo’s discussion shares more in common with the first set of ideas than with the second. Like Woodhull and other feminists, she maintained that love, not civil approval, is what makes a sexual relationship moral.73 Capetillo’s feminism grew out of her strong commitment to socialism. She not only read the work of socialists and anarchists as theorists but had

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actually lived the realities they sought to address. Early in “Mi Opinion” she asserts that government should provide citizens with the basic goods they need for survival—food, adequate shelter, and education. She also implores wealthy women to educate themselves about the needs that exist in poor communities. Women of means, she said, could urge government to improve living conditions—or donate their own time and money to help needy people instead.74 One of the longer selections in “Mi Opinion” is “A Letter to My Daughter, Manuela Ledesma Capetillo,” which is comprised of roughly thirty pages of moral instruction, political analysis, and personal reflections. Capetillo was estranged from her daughter for many years, due to strained relations with the girl’s father—an upper-class man to whom Capetillo was never married. Although she addresses many of the same issues and themes in this letter, she does so with more passion and conviction. She is also surprisingly candid about love, marriage, and sexuality in this letter—especially given the fact that the girl would have been only in her early teens when “Mi Opinion” was published. Fairly early in the letter, however, Capetillo stated one of the reasons she wrote it. She feared their estrangement “might open up the space in your mind for certain aristocratic lines of thought which might cause you to believe in the differences between classes.”75 Capetillo wanted to do her best to maintain her relationship with her daughter, of course, but while they were apart, all she could do was urge her to hold onto the progressive values she held dear. A good portion of Capetillo’s “Letter to My Daughter” condemns capitalism as a tool that is used to control and oppress workers. Workers can resist capitalist control, she says, by keeping their common interests in mind and forming collectives. Individuals can do so by repeatedly reminding themselves, “ ‘I don’t want to,’ ‘I don’t want to’ [become a capitalist] with all [their] mental strength.” Writing as if in confidence, Capetillo notes that she sometimes has to remind herself that it is better “to be financially unstable before exploiting others,” because “wealth is so pernicious in the current state of the world that it destroys all human feelings.”76 She continues attempting



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to instill her own values in her daughter, urging her to work for justice, to be altruistic, and to be a moral exemplar: “If you see an obstacle on the path, remove it, because another may pass without seeing it and could fall.”77 She then moves to religious instruction—providing commentary on each of the Ten Commandments before bringing this letter to a close. Capetillo’s life was cut short by tuberculosis, which she is likely to have contracted while in New York, at the age of forty-three. She appears to have been a colorful and passionate personality, having the distinction of being arrested for wearing pants in Havana in 1915.78 Without the benefit of having access to more translations of her work, there is not an opportunity to explore more of her ideas here. However, an incisive expression of her political views appears toward the end of “Mi Opinion,” which provides an appropriate conclusion to this discussion of her life and thought: “Sometimes a street sweeper is more useful to a country than a public official.”79

Conclusion I have included these social/political activists in this volume as a challenge to the time-worn tradition of deferring to the philosopher in the tower, who is detached from events in public life and is therefore said to take an “objective view” of the world. As stated at the opening of this chapter, exploring the ideas developed by thinkers who were also engaged in activism on the ground level helps us to rethink what we mean by the term “philosopher.” Each of the women in this chapter had strong personal commitments to their chosen field of activity. Their ideals informed their commitments, of course. For instance, Ames Mead and Addams shared strong convictions that peace and reconciliation are far superior to war and conflict. Their work was informed not only by the study of philosophy (Kant in particular for Ames Mead), but by their observations of the world around them and the needs within it. Wells-Barnett possessed a deep sense of the need for justice and

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equality in a democratic society. And Capetillo yearned for an economically just world where gender equality was a reality. Both Wells-Barnett and Capetillo received less formal education than some women began to enjoy in their era, but they were both voracious readers. They were also extensively involved in their respective communities and political organizations, and their experiences there informed their thought. Wells-Barnett’s writings often belied her familiarity with legal concepts and structures—no doubt a by-product of working alongside her lawyer-husband on justice issues. Although none of these women made a display of their faith commitments, each of them was strongly influenced by their religious upbringing. Ames Mead was a Congregationalist who grew to appreciate her husband’s more liberal Unitarian tradition. Addams was a Quaker who became more religiously liberal and interfaith-focused over time. Wells-Barnett was devoted to the African Methodist Episcopal tradition and later in life found herself comfortable in the Presbyterian denomination. Capetillo was a Catholic with interest in alternative forms of spirituality. Ames Mead and Addams rarely referred to religion in their written work. Wells-Barnett and Capetillo often invoked religion as the foundation of ethics and justice. Finally, each of these women was decidedly feminist in and through her own cultural context. And in each case, this involved support of women’s higher education, equal employment, and voting rights. Ames Mead and Addams attended virtually every women’s peace event they were able to fit into their schedules. Both they and Wells-Barnett joined the then-powerful women’s club movement in the United States, both locally and nationally. Capetillo was devoted to feminism but stood aloof from organized versions of it; her feminist concerns were more closely related to her own experience as a single mother and a working-class woman living under colonial rule. All of these influences in each woman’s life contributed to their impulse to cross boundaries related to both gender and intellectual authority. They agitated for full participation in political and economic life and claimed authority as public intellectuals on their own terms. As a result they developed



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a political philosophy informed by activism. And as Michele Moody-Adams has noted, engaging in activism is sometimes necessary in order to “expand our conceptual space,” and develop an adequate philosophical theory—one that is responsive to the world in which we live.80 The second volume of this study will examine the work of women who crossed yet another boundary by claiming authority in the academic world: the first twenty US and Canadian women to earn doctorates, teach philosophy, and/or publish philosophical works in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

NOTES

Chapter 1 1 Critical race theory is a term that I use to refer to discussions by “interdisciplinary scholars and activists interested in studying and changing the relationship between race, racism and power,” as described on UCLA’s School of Public Affairs webpage: https​://sp​acrs.​wordp​ress.​com/w​hat-i​s-cri​tical​-race​-theo​ry/. It is not to be confused with “critical theory” in the narrow sense, as developed by Horkheimer and Adorno, although some versions of critical race theory adopt the theories and methods of inquiry developed by that school of thought. 2 Discussions of the public and private spheres abounded in works by both men and women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Rousseau’s Emile Allan Bloom’s edition (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindications: The Rights of Man and The Rights of Woman (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997); Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends, or Self-training (London: Charles Tilt, 1839), especially regarding the joys of housekeeping, pp. 71–86. 3 I remain thankful to my advisor when I was in graduate school at Boston University, James Schmidt, for pointing me in the direction of the St. Louis Hegelians and the rich research trail it led me to. I still have the index card he inserted in the book, with the handwritten note that said, “Bingo! See page 278” in reference to William Goetzmann’s book, The American Hegelians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). 4 First issued in 1988, Gates’s Schomburg Collection was reviewed by Elizabeth Ammons in Black American Literature Forum, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 811–27 and has recently been digitized: http:​//dig​ital.​nypl.​org/s​chomb​urg/w​riter​s_aa1​9/int​ro.ht​ml. 5 The first and most far-reaching contemporary source is Mary Ellen Waithe’s History of Women Philosophers, in four volumes, published by Kluwer Press (Dordrecht) between 1987 and 1993, which provides biographical sketches and selections from primary sources for women from ancient times to the twentieth century. Several other works discussing the range of women in philosophy throughout history followed, for example: Therese Boos Dykeman, American Women Philosophers, 1650–1930: Six Exemplary Thinkers (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993); Margaret Atherton, Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994); Linda Lopez Macalister, Hypatia’s Daughters: 1500 Years of Women Philosophers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996); Mary Warnock, Women Philosophers (London: Everyman Press, 1996); Therese Boos Dkyeman, The Neglected Canon: Nine Women Philosophers (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999); Cecile Tougas, Presenting Women Philosophers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); and Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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6 For a discussion of genre and women’s work, see Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004). 7 Felix Matos, Introduction to A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out, by Luisa Capetillo (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004), p. xxxiii. 8 See Sarah Tyson, Where are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), who makes a good case for inclusion of women across races/cultures with the aim of transforming philosophy as a discipline. 9 See Kurt Leidecker, “The Education of Negroes in St. Louis, Missouri, During William Torrey Harris’ Administration,” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 10, no. 4 (October 1941), p. 646. 10 Oscar Waring was one such educator. Haydee (Moss) Campbell and Helene Abbott were recruited from Oberlin to teach in the newly established kindergarten program for African American children. Members of the prominent Vashon family were also among the teachers recruited to teach in the “colored” schools in St. Louis: John B. Vashon, George B. Vashon, and Emma Vashon. 11 See Leidecker, “The Education of Negroes in St. Louis, Missouri, During William Torrey Harris’ Administration,” p. 646. 12 As early as 1873, critics charged that “the Pope in the Vatican is as democratic as the present Superintendent” (Kurt Leidecker, Yankee Teacher (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 259). In 1878, the Globe-Democrat of St. Louis called Harris’s pep talk to teachers, “a psychopathic homily in two parts—part one transcendental, lasting an hour, and part two practical, about ten minutes” (Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, p. 343). During his tenure he was also blamed for creating an environment that enabled a teacher to have an affair (Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, p. 353). 13 See profile of Arthur Craig in Who’s Who of the Colored Race, volume 1, Frank Lincoln Mather, ed. (Chicago: Memento edition, 1915), pp. 79–80.

Chapter 2 1 Mary Briody Mahowald provides a good overview along with selections from De Anima and Politics in which Aristotle describes women as deformed men, as passive receptacles in reproduction, and as being unsuited for public life. See Mahowald, Philosophy of Women (Hackett, 1978), pp. 22–31. 2 See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, section 164, Addition; sections 165, 166. I use an early translation of this work, because it most closely resembles the discussion of Hegel by early idealists in the US - the translation by S.W. Dyde (George Bell and Sons, 1896), pp. 168–172.

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3 Susan Blow, Symbolic Education: A Commentary on Froebel’s “Mother Play,” vol. XXVI in International Education Series, William T. Harris, ed. (Appleton, 1894), p. 154. 4 Susan Fleming, “Margarethe Meyer Schurz,” in Jewish Women’s Archive online: https​://jw​a.org​/ency​clope​dia/a​rticl​e/sch​urz-m​argar​ethe-​meyer.​ 5 See Josephine Mirabella Elliott, ed. Partnership for Posterity: The Correspondence of William MacLure and Marie Duclos Fretageot, 1820–1833 (Indiana Historical Society, 1994), p. 1045. See also: Patricia Tyson Stroud, “‘At what do you think the ladies will stop?’ Women at the Academy,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, vol. 162 (March 2013), pp. 196, 204. 6 William MacLure, Opinions on Various Subjects, vol. 1, entries for March 14, 1828 (p. 245) and March 26, 1828 (p. 258) (New Harmony, Indiana: School Press Publishers, 1831 edition). In this memoir and travelogue, MacLure noted that he printed articles about his plan in Mexican newspapers, after having given a copy to government translators for dissemination. See also letters from J. Antonio Padillo to the chief of the Department of Bexar, possibly Ramón Músquiz, July 5, 1828, and October 28, 1828. Both are available in GoogleBooks. 7 Madame Fretageout’s comment is from Leonard Warren, MacLure of New Harmony (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 244. The boys’ names and ages were not reported, and I have not located records that disclose their fate. 8 This school was established by William Case. See: Helen May et al., Empire Education, and Indigenous Childhoods (New York: Routledge, 2016). See also, “Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary,” by Eileen F. Moffett in The Priscilla Papers, vol. 10, no. 1 (1996), pp. 1–7; available online: https​://ww​w.aca​demia​.edu/​35013​042/B​etsey​ _Stoc​kton_​Pione​er_Am​erica​n_Mis​siona​ry. 9 The English educator, Samuel Wilderspin, published two manuals of early childhood education: On the Importance of Educating the Infant Children of the Poor (London: T. Goyder, printers, 1823), revised and printed as Infant Education, or, Remarks on the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor (London: T. Goyder, printers, 1825). In the United States, Mary Howland published a guide for teachers that drew on some of Wilderspin’s arguments and techniques, The Infant School Manual (Boston: Richardson, Lord, and Holbrook, 1830). Both authors are cited in reference to the Grape Island School by Helen May et al., Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods, pp. 99–10 and 164–65, respectively. 10 The record of Betsey Stockton’s hiring at Grape Island is from Helen May et al., Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 164, citing an entry dated July 30, 1829, in the annual report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society, 1830. 11 With no formal educational institutions open to African Americans in Philadelphia at this time, Stockton seems to have been self-taught. The journal she kept as well as that of her former master, Ashbel Green—the president of Princeton University at the time—shows that she was given access to his extensive library. She was one of the first teachers hired at the new Quaker-sponsored school for African American education,

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Gaskill Street School. See chapters on Stockton’s childhood and time in Philadelphia in “Betsey Stockton,” by Gregory Nobles, The Princeton & Slavery Project online: https​://sl​avery​.prin​ceton​.edu/​stori​es/be​tsey-​stock​ton#3​125. 12 See “Betsey Stockton’s Journal,” in African-American Religion: A Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, available online in AARDOCS: AfricanAmerican Religion: A Documentary History Project, Continental Phase—Sample Documents, https​://aa​rdoc.​sites​.amhe​rst.e​du/Be​tsey_​Stock​ton_J​ourna​l_1.h​tml (not attributed to an author). This essay provides an overview of Stockton’s life, including glowing accounts of her intelligence and a discussion of her relationship with the white family she worked for—at a time when New Jersey law would have allowed her to remain a slave. The essay also provides one of the most complete bibliographies available about Stockton’s life and work. 13 See Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters (Boston: Mariner Books, 2006); Monika Elbert, Julie E. Hall, and Katharine Rodier, eds., Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2006); John P. Miller, Transcendental Learning: The Educational Legacy of Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Peabody and Thoreau (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2012); Carol Faulkner, “Women and the American Freedmen’s Union Commission,” in Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 14 See Carter G. Woodson, Education of the Negro (EWorld Inc., 2001; originally published in 1919), p. 398. Many sources indicate that Emmeline Shadd attended and/ or taught at Howard University, but in extensive online searches, she did not appear in Howard catalogs. Perhaps some catalogs are not available online, or Emmeline was confused with another member of the large and successful Shadd family—perhaps Eunice Shadd or Nettie Shadd, both of whom were enrolled in the medical school in the 1870s. See Howard University college catalogues, accessed via Ancestry.com. 15 W. B. Hartgrove, “The Story of Maria Louise Moore and Fannie M. Richards,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1916), pp. 23–33. Published online by Association for the Study of African American Life and History; http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2713513. 16 Joseph Workman v. The Board of Education of Detroit, 18 Mich. 400 (1869). 17 See Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, vol. 22 (1910), p. 174. 18 See “Why the National Association of Colored Women Should Devise Means for Establishing Kindergartens,” at the annual meeting of the NACW. This speech has sometimes been attributed to Mary Church Terrell. 19 This praise of Campbell is from Kindergarten Magazine, vol. 6, pp. 376–77 (1893). See also Godey’s Ladies’ Book, vol. 135, p. 29 (1897); Kindergarten News, vol. 7, p. 422; Kindergarten for Teachers and Parents, vol. 14, p. 439; Southern Workman, vol. 36, p. 502 (1907); Sidonie A. Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Before They Could Vote: Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919, p. 239 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

NOTES  195

20 Mendez de Cuenca was a feminist who began a periodical La Mujer Mexicana after her US visit. See Milada Bazant, “Una musa de la modernidad [A muse of modernity]: Laura Mendez de Cuenca (1853–1928),” Revista Historia de la Educacion Latinamericana, vol. 15, no. 21 (July/December 2013), pp. 40–41. 21 Justo Sierra became Mexico’s secretary of justice and public education in 1902 and minister of public education in 1905. For more information about this period of educational development in Mexico. See Ernesto Meneses Morales, Tendencias educativas oficiales en Mexico [Official educational trends in Mexico]: 1821–1911 (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1998), pp. 660–61. 22 For a biographical sketch of F. Y. Tsao, see Ruby Sia, “Chinese Women Educated Abroad,” World’s Chinese Students’ Journal, vol. 2, no. 3 (November–December 1907), pp. 30–31. 23 For a biographical sketch of Julia Yen, see Ruby Sia, “Chinese Women Educated Abroad,” p. 32. 24 About the education and career path of Ilien Tang, see Welthy B. Honsinger, “Kindergarten in Central China,” Kindergarten Review, vol. 22, pp. 635–36. See also, F. Y. Tsao, “A Brief History of Chinese Women Students in America,” Chinese Student’s Monthly, vol. 6, p. 220 (note a printing error; page number should be 620) (1911). 25 Information about M. T. Chang’s career appears in F. Y. Tsao, “A Brief History of Chinese Women Students in America,” p. 622. 26 Sia’s statement appears in F. Y. Tsao, “A Brief History of Chinese Women Students in America,” p. 621. 27 Tape v. Hurley, 66 Cal. 473. 28 Rose Thayer was appointed principal and lead teacher of the Chinese Primary School in San Francisco, serving from 1887 to 1903. See San Francisco Call newspaper, April 13, 1887. The incident with a reporter from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin took place in 1896. See Wendy Rouse Jorae The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 127. See also, David Palter, “Testing for Race: Stanford University, Asian Americans, and Psychometric Testing in California, 1920–1935,” doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, pp. 90–91, citing Cora M. Older’s article, “Teaching English to the Little Yellow Men,” San Francisco Saturday Evening Bulletin, April 4, 1896. In 1903, Thayer and another teacher were enlisted to assist a former student who was detained for two weeks after returning from a trip to Honolulu, despite the fact that he presented authorities with his birth certificate, passport, two previous landing cards, and two documents verifying voter registration. Thayer and her colleague confirmed they had been the young man’s teachers and that his documents were valid. See Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Honolulu, July 2, 1903. Thayer later married Ransford D. Bucknam, aka Bucknam Pasha (1869–1915), a commander in the Turkish navy. They lived in Turkey, where she worked as a nurse (1904–1915). Source: St. Lawrence Republican newspaper, June 6, 1915.

196 NOTES

29 See Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Company, 1910), 295. 30 See Hilliker, “The Blow Family,” Address to Carondelet Women’s Club, February 7, 1955, pp. 9A and 16; Leidecker, 270–71. 31 See Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, pp. 301–02; and Cleon Forbes, “The St. Louis School of Thought,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 25 (1931), p. 619. 32 See Susan Blow, Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel, vol. XLV in Inter­ national Education Series, William T. Harris, ed. (New York: Appleton, 1899), p. 194. 33 Susan Blow joined with colleagues to establish the Committee of Nineteen to help promote traditional Froebelian kindergarten methods and theory. See International Kindergarten Union reports, vol. 1, 1913. Regarding Laura Fisher as a Froebelian purist, see Kindergarten and Primary Magazine, vol. 26, p. 306 (1914). Blow’s attitudes toward colleagues who departed from Froebelian methods are reflected in comments made in correspondence with William Torrey Harris: She charged that William Hailmann’s pedagogical methods were “injuring the cause” and that he was “color[ing] Froebel with his own views,”—[no date] 1885 and May 13, 1887, respectively. About Alice Putnam, Blow said, “she believes everything that is new” is worthwhile: Letter to W.T. Harris, June 21, 1896; St. Louis Historical Society Blow Family Papers. 34 See Nina Vanderwalker, The Kindergarten in American Education (New York: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 170–72, who praised the work of Susan Blow, but also noted that Blow’s ideas were becoming outdated: “[hers is] an interpretation of Froebel . . . against which there is a growing reaction. For the philosophy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which shaped to a large extent the theory and the practice of the kindergarten, has been replaced by a new interpretation of man and the universe . . . to which modern psychology gives the cue.” 35 Biographical information about Josephine Silone Yates comes from the sketch authored by Errin Jackson, “Black Past,” online: https​://ww​w.bla​ckpas​t.org​/afri​cana​meric​an-hi​story​/yate​s-jos​ephin​e-sil​one-1​852-1​912. 36 See Jeanne Robbins, “Black Club Women’s Purposes for Establishing Kindergartens in the Progressive Era, 1896–1906,” Jeanne Robbins, doctoral dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago (2011), p. 139. 37 Kindergarten Magazine, vol. 14, p. 486 (1902) this recognition identifies Yates as a “colored” woman and continues to discuss her views about women as educational leaders within the African American community. 38 Mary Church Terrell published a memoir and has been the subject of a number of biographies. For a good brief biographical sketch, see Tyina Steptoe’s article in “Black Past,” online: https​://ww​w.bla​ckpas​t.org​/afri​can-a​meric​an-hi​story​/terr​ell-m​aryc​hurch​-1863​-1954.​ 39 Emma Johnson Goulette may have attended the Institute for Colored Youth or studied privately with the white kindergarten educator Anna Hallowell in Philadelphia.

NOTES  197

40 Development of the terminology in use within philosophy today would merit a study of its own. But for the purposes of this chapter, I’ll simply note that, although the terms “rationalism” and “empiricism” were certainly in use in Blow’s time, they were not as firmly established to signal distinct approaches within epistemology as they were in the decades after Blow published her most theoretical work, Symbolic Education and the chapter entitled “Three World Views,” in Blow’s Educational Issues in the Kindergarten. These terms as we use them today were first hinted toward by Kant, then introduced by Hegel in Lectures on History of Philosophy. Blow was proficient in German, so she may have read the majority of Hegel’s work in the original, but if she consulted translations, the volumes that would have been available to her include The History of Philosophy, translated by John Sibree in 1858 and revised in 1899; Elizabeth Haldane’s translation appeared in 1892. Another translation of this work did not appear in the United States during Blow’s lifetime. 41 For a discussion of this term by Terrell, see Jeanne Robbins, “Black Club Women’s Purposes for Establishing Kindergartens in the Progressive Era, 1896–1906,” doctoral dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago (2011), pp. 127–28 and by Yates, pp. 144, 148. 42 Blow, Symbolic Education, 205–06. 43 Ibid., 40–41. 44 Ibid., 38. 45 Blow, Mottoes and Commentaries, 111. 46 Ibid., 6. 47 Ibid. 48 Harris, introduction to Blow’s Mottoes and Commentaries, xiii. 49 Blow, “Kindergarten Education,” 38; Mottoes and Commentaries, 24. 50 Blow, Symbolic Education, 120. 51 Ibid., 122; 167–69. 52 Hilliker, “The Life and Work of Susan Blow,” unpublished manuscript in the collection of the Carondelet Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri (1952), p. 20. 53 Blow, Symbolic Education, p. 192. 54 Susan Blow was reticent to criticize Dewey too harshly in published work, but after a visit to schools that used Dewey’s methods, she wrote to William Torrey Harris, “I saw some dreadful work at the Buffalo School of Pedagogy,” and at Deweyan schools, “the whole principle they were working with seemed wrong.” See Blow’s letters to Harris, June 12, 1893, and June 28, 1893, Susan Blow. Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. 55 See Alexander S. Dawson, “Histories and Memories of the Indian Boarding Schools in Mexico, Canada, and the United States,” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 39, no. 5 (September 2012), pp. 92–93.

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56 See Dorothy W. Hewes, “Those First Good Years of Indian Education: 1894 to 1898,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 5, no. 2 (1981), pp. 63–82. 57 Richard Pratt made his infamous statement at the annual meeting of the Council on Charities and Corrections, 1892. 58 See Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History, 2nd edition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), pp. 99–100. 59 Emma Johnson Goulette, “Higher Standards in Civil Service for the Indian School Employee,” Quarterly Journal of Society of American Indians, vol. 3 (1915), p. 100. 60 Ibid., pp. 98–99. 61 Activities of the Society of American Indians were reported in the Southern Workman, a periodical published at Hampton College, in November 1912 (vol. 41, p. 600), indicating that there was a sense of solidarity between the two cultural groups. 62 Proceedings of the First Conference of the Society of American Indians, October 10–11, 1911, pp. 101–02. 63 In letters to William Torrey Harris, Blow praises and/or enlists his support for select colleagues or former students, in many cases asking him to keep them in mind for open teaching positions: [Caroline] Hart in Toronto (March 15, 1889), Baltimore (October 21, 1893) and in an unnamed location (April 19, 1898); [Harriet] Niel, in Saratoga (June 5, 1892); Laura Fisher in Boston (October 21, 1893); [Agnes] Wilson in an unnamed location (May 14, 1897), then again in Nashville (January [n.d.] 1901); Frances Dodge in Washington, D.C. (January 11, 1900). It appears that all the women she supported in this way were of European descent; in letters to Harris she never mentions disciples or colleagues who were women of color, like Haydee Campbell or Helene Abbott. See Susan Blow Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. 64 Goulette, “Higher Standards in Civil Service for the Indian School Employee,” p. 100. 65 Ibid., pp. 101–02. 66 See Report from Lucie Calista Maley, in The Kindergarten for Teacher and Parents, vol. 10, pp. 438–40 (1898). Here Maley made reference to the kindergarten expert from whom Susan Blow received some training, Madame von Bulow. 67 See Report from Lucie Calista Maley, in The Kindergarten for Teacher and Parents, vol. 10, pp. 438–40 (1898). 68 Sarah Mather taught at the Pine Ridge reservation school in what was then Dakota Territory and the Cherokee Rosebuds School in Oklahoma. Mather provided her own account in Kindergarten Magazine and is referred to in Cecile Lascarides and Blythe Hintz, History of Early Childhood Education (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 474. It is important to note that Mather was recruited by Richard Pratt, who is famous for his “Kill the Indian in the man, save the man,” stance, so she may have had assimilationist tendencies. 69 For an outline of this discussion among St. Louis educators, see The Western Review, vol. 1, pp. 118–19 (February 1876) and vol. 1, pp. 176–77 (April 1876).

NOTES  199

70 Mary Church Terrell, “Why the NACW Should Devise Means of Establishing Kindergartens,” 1899; cited in Robbins, “Black Club Women’s Purposes for Establishing Kindergartens in the Progressive Era, 1896–1906,” p. 125. 71 See proceedings of the first conference of the Society of American Indians, October 10–11, 1911; pp. 101–02. 72 St. Louis Schools Annual Report, 1879–1880, pp. 136–37. 73 Terrell, “Why We Need Money,” 1899; cited in Robbins, 111. 74 Yates, “The Twentieth Century Negro: His Opportunities for Success,” 1906b, p. 227; cited in Robbins, p. 150. 75 Yates, “The Twentieth Century Negro: His Opportunities for Success,” 1906b, p. 227; cited in Robbins, p. 151. 76 Yates, “The Twentieth Century Negro: His Opportunities for Success,” p. 238 (1906b); cited in Robbins, p. 154. 77 Terrell, “Why the NACW Should Devise Means,” 1899; cited in Robbins, 112. 78 Anna Murray, “A Plea for Kindergarten in the Southland,” Kindergarten Magazine, vol. 13, no. 3 (November 1900), pp. 120–21. 79 Yates, “Kindergartens and Mothers’ Clubs as Related to the Work of the NACW,” p. 309; 1905c; cited in Robbins, p. 170. 80 See Barbara Welter’s influential essay condemning nineteenth-century ideals of femininity, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1966), pp. 151–74. 81 See Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead: http:​//www​.adel​aideh​oodle​ss.ca​/hist​ory/ a​delai​des-s​tory. 82 See Clara Root, “Domestic Science in the Indian Home,” Indian School Journal, vol. 18 (1918), pp. 32–34. A very brief mention of Root is provided in Daniel F. Littlefield, Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., and James W. Parins, A Biobibliography of Native American Writers, 1772–1924: A Supplement, p. 287 (New York: Scarecrow Press/ Rowman & Littlefield, 1985); accessible in GoogleBooks. Note: In the introduction to a special issue of Hypatia on women in the American philosophical tradition in 2004, I mistakenly attributed a discussion of domestic science among Native American women to Rachel Caroline Eaton after seeing references to her article “Domestic Science Among the Primitive Cherokee” as well as selections from Eaton’s discussion of domestic life in precolonial Native America in her major work, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians (Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing, 1914). But if Eaton wrote a separate article on domestic science, it appears to be no longer extant. The article I should have cited was this short article by Clara Root, who fully embraced and endorsed European understandings of domesticity. 83 From “Hampton Incidents,” Southern Workman, vol. XLIV (1915), pp. 315–16, available online: https​://ar​chive​.org/​detai​ls/so​uther​nwork​man01​instg​oog/p​age/n​352.

200 NOTES

84 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, unabridged edition with an introduction by Denise Marshall (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2002), p. 264. 85 See Susan Blow’s mention of the Ewig-Weibliche in Symbolic Education, p. 197. In letters to William Torrey Harris, she also discusses women’s role and rights: “I agree with Hegel about the feminine mind,” March 9, 1897. In a later exchange, Blow recognized the value of Harris’s recent claims about women’s rights to political participation, yet adds, “I still do not feel sure [about women’s rights],” September 30, 1900. Both letters are in the Blow Family Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. 86 See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §§158–180, S.W. Dyde translation; (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), and Phenomenology of Spirit, §§450–452, Terry Pinkard translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Froebel also values the family but does not discuss it as fully as Hegel does. See Froebel, The Education of Man, §86, W.N. Hailmann translation (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications [1898] 2005). 87 Susan Blow, Kindergarten Education (Albany: Lyon, 1904), p. 44. 88 Ibid., pp. 43–44. 89 Mary Church Terrell, first NACW presidential address, 1897; cited in Robbins, pp. 127–28. 90 Mary Church Terrell, first NACW presidential address of NACW, 1897; cited in Robbins, pp. 115–16. 91 Yates, “Kindergarten and Mothers’ Clubs as Related to the Work of the National Association of Colored Women,” p. 307; 1905; cited in Robbins, p. 155; emphasis mine. 92 Thomas Moss was one of the victims of lynching whom both Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett knew well. His murder is discussed in the section on Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Chapter 5. 93 Mary Church Terrell, “The Duty of the NACW to the Race,” 1900, quoted in Jones, B. W. (1990). Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863–1954 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990), p. 144. 94 See Southern Workman, vol. 30 (1901), p. 361. 95 See Annual Report of the Public Schools of Columbus, Georgia, 1906. 96 See Asheville and Vicinity: A Handbook, 1897. 97 See Directory of 156 Education Committees and Associations in the United States, compiled by Dora Keen, Public Education Association of Philadelphia, March 1907, p. 12. 98 Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, vol. 18 (1906), p. 131. 99 Terrell, “Duty of the NACW to the Race,” 1900; cited in Robbins, p. 116.

NOTES  201

100 See Kindergarten for Teachers and Parents, vol. 20 (1908), p. 235, providing a historical sketch of the Louisville early childhood education program, with a teacher training school for African American women in 1899 and the inclusion of the (still-segregated) African American kindergarten teachers’ association as a branch within the larger network in 1907. Similar updates on the provision of education for African American children were provided with relative frequency in this and other outlets, such as Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, vol. 8 (1896), p. 542 on new provisions for African American education in Topeka, Kansas, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. 101 Anna Garlin Spencer, “The Changing Population of Our Large Cities,” KindergartenPrimary Magazine, vol. 63, p. 71. 102 International Kindergarten Union proceedings, 1920, p. 138. 103 Blow, Educational Issues, xiv. 104 Blow, Letter to James Jackson Putnam, May 17, 1908. Blow makes a statement to this same effect in the preface to her book, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, xiv.

Chapter 3 1 In Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, the Supreme Court ruled the nation’s new Fourteenth Amendment did not create any new rights; voting is not a “privilege” but the right of a citizen; therefore, it does not apply to women. A curious line of reasoning, to be sure. Shortly after this, another defeat was handed down to women as the Supreme Court denied Myra Bradwell’s right to practice law. In this case, the Supreme Court determined that states have the power to dictate which professions any class of people may perform; therefore, a state that prohibits women from practicing law is acting within its rightful domain. See Bradwell v. State of Illinois, 83 U.S. 130. 2 Mrs. Charles P. Johnson, Notable Women of St. Louis (St. Louis: Woodward Printing Company, 1914), p. 70. 3 Register of the State Normal School, 1839–1889, Framingham State College, from Archives and Special Collections, Whittemore Library, Framingham State College. See also Edith Kendall, Anna C. Brackett, In Memoriam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), p. 1. 4 “Superintendent’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, June 1863. 5 See Missouri Historical Review, 5:187; 34:237. Newspapers in the Midwest indicated that Brackett’s salary as a normal school principal—$2,500/year—made her one of the highest-paid teachers in the United States. See, for example, Spirit Lake News (Iowa), March 15, 1872. The St. Louis Schools Annual Report, for year ending 1870

202 NOTES

(vol. 16, p. lxxxii), confirms Brackett was paid $2,500/year, and her vice principal was paid $1,300/year. Note, however, that the high school principal, who was male, was paid $3,000/year, and the assistant principal, also male, was paid $2,500/year. Male teachers in the high school earned between $1,500/year and $2,000/year. Female teachers in both the normal school and high school earned between $750/ year and $1,400/year. 6 Regarding The Journal of Education, see Maria Francis Lundgren, “Anna Callender Brackett: Editor, Essayist, Poet,” Iowa State University master’s thesis, 1989, 14. St. Louis Ladies’ Magazine was edited by Mary Nolan and Christine Smith in 1870–71. Brackett contributed an article for what was probably a regular feature entitled “Woman and Work” in one of the two copies I was able to locate (perhaps the only copies extant). 7 “Woman Educator Is Dead,” obituary from the archives of the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, MO (title of newspaper unknown). 8 While other organizations had been established to address a number of women’s issues, the Missouri Woman’s Suffrage Association was the first in the nation to focus solely on voting rights. For evidence of Hazard’s and Beedy’s roles in the suffrage movement, see The History of Woman Suffrage, compiled by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, vol. 3 (Rochester, NY: Charles Mann Printing, 1886), pp. 595–605. On William Torrey Harris’s and Thomas Davidson’s membership in the Missouri Woman Suffrage Association, see Hyde and Conard, Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis, Missouri (St. Louis: Southern History Company, 1899), p. 2529. Phoebe Couzins was the first woman in Missouri to earn a law degree. Virginia Minor filed a lawsuit charging that she had a constitutional right to vote, based on the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Minor v. Happersett, 88 US (21 Wall) 162, (1875). 9 Anna C. Brackett, “Margaret Fuller,” The Radical, 9:354 (December 1871). 10 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 5:38–48. 11 The sections on sex education are an exception; they were greatly condensed in both the paraphrase and the translation. The translation in Journal of Speculative Philosophy includes §§72–74 on sex education, but then jumps to §80 on intellectual education. Yet she addresses many of these issues in her own works, much of it in proper Victorian language, but she does venture into difficult areas, such as dysmenorrhae and male sexually predatory behavior; see Anna Brackett, The Education of American Girls (New York: Putnam, 1874), pp. 67–69. 12 References are to Brackett’s paraphrase of the Pedagogics, because this work makes more apparent instances in which she offers her own interpretations. Citations in parentheses give the section number and JSP volume and page number for the paraphrase, e.g.: (§84, JSP15:38) = section 84 of the paraphrase, which appears in vol. 15, p. 38 in JSP). 13 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1864, p. 24.

NOTES  203

14 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1868, pp. 25–26. 15 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1868, pp. 21–22. 16 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1871, p. 52. 17 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1869, pp. 40–41. 18 Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), pp. 546–47. 19 Ida Eliot’s family ties were highlighted in a news article on women in secondary education: Spirit Lake News, March 15, 1872. Additional genealogical sleuthing led to the discovery that her great-grandfather was Samuel Eliot (1739–1820), a wealthy Boston banker with seven children, among them: (a) William Greenleaf Eliot, Sr., whose children included Ida’s father, Thomas Dawes Eliot, as well as her uncle William; (b) Catherine Eliot, the mother of Charles Eliot Norton; (c) William H. Eliot, father of Samuel Eliot; and (d) Samuel Atkins Eliot, father of Charles W. Eliot. 20 See Anna C. Brackett, Letters to Thomas Davidson, December 14, 1873, and March 1, 1874. 21 Searches in Ancestry.com have shown that Hope was born in Scotland and became a US citizen in 1920. She became a teacher in Boston and appears to have remained single. It is not clear if Bertha earned a college degree, but she is listed as a music teacher in census records. During the First World War, she applied to serve as a driver for the American Fund for French Wounded, and application documents include an affidavit confirming her adoption by Ida Eliot in February 1876. In the 1910s and 1920s Bertha began living with the writer Marie Denervaud, who is listed as a “partner” in one census record and a “companion” in the other. She accompanied Bertha on trips to Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, but later married Henry W. Dun, Jr., in April 1931. 22 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1866, pp. 15–16. 23 Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1872, pp. 185–86. 24 “Principal’s Report,” St. Louis Public School Annual Report, 1871, pp. 50–51. 25 Brackett, The Education of American Girls (Putnam, 1874), p. 82. 26 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §166 Addition. I use an early translation of Hegel, because it most closely matches the understanding of early idealists in the US – by S.W. Dyde (George Bell & Sons, 1896), pp. 172–73. 27 Anna C. Brackett, Letter to Thomas Davidson, December 14, 1873. Emphasis and caps are in original. See Thomas Davidson Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 28 Brackett, The Education of American Girls (New York: Putnam, 1874), p. 103. Quote marks are added to reflect Brackett’s overall tone on this point in her discussion. 29 Interestingly, in her paraphrase of the Pedagogics, Brackett omits Rosenkranz’s mention of the importance of familial bonds as well as his condemnation of the Platonic obliteration of them.

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30 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §238; Dyde translation, pp. 128–29. Again, it is not clear if Brackett was familiar with this work firsthand, but she certainly was aware of the general argument, and that it had been applied only to men at this point. 31 Anna Brackett, “Sex in Education,” in The Education of American Girls (New York: Putnam, 1874), p. 374. 32 This stands in rather stark contrast to Brackett’s failure to make any critical commentary on Rosenkranz’s endorsement of corporal punishment, a method of discipline to which both she and Harris were opposed. 33 JSP, vol. 14, pp. 198–99. 34 Edward Hammond Clarke, Sex and Education, or A fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company, 1873). Clarke had long argued against women’s higher education, claiming that they were emotionally and physically unsuited for it, particularly during menstruation. Many feminists raised objections to this work. Julia Ward Howe also edited a work, Sex and Education (Boston: Roberts, 1874) in response to Clarke in the same year. In fact, because Clarke’s theory had been so influential, the newly established Association of Collegiate Alumnae (now AAUW) commissioned a study to combat claims of this sort—nine years after Clarke’s book had appeared. ACA surveyed over 2,000 college-educated women asking them to assess their own health and well-being. Sixty percent said their education had no negative effects on them. See Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977), pp. 87–88. 35 Brackett, “Sex in Education,” pp. 378–79. Many women in this era were agitating for changes in women’s social status, and reforming the Victorian understanding of women as delicate but valuable reproductive vessels were certainly on their agenda. Like Brackett, many first-wave feminists were comfortable supporting the emotional aspect of women’s mothering abilities. At the same time, they were often critical of the way in which this translated into biological determinism. Julia Ward Howe edited a volume intended to counter the influence of Clarke’s work, with essays by other prominent feminists. See Howe’s Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E.H. Clarke’s Sex in Education (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874). 36 Brackett, “Sex in Education,” p. 388. 37 Brackett, “Education of American Girls,” in the edited volume by the same name (Putnam, 1874), p. 61. 38 Ibid., p. 62. 39 Ibid., p. 63. 40 Ibid., p. 68. 41 Ibid., p. 69. 42 Ibid.

NOTES  205

43 Ibid. 44 Brackett letters to Sunderland, January 14, 1888, and January 23, 1888, in Eliza Jane Read Sunderland Papers, Bentley Historic Library Archives, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (emphasis in original). 45 Rosa Maria González Jiménez, “The Normal School for Women and Liberal Feminism in Mexico City in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” in Resources for Feminist Research (Toronto), vol. 34, no. 1, p. 37. 46 Brackett, “Sex in Education,” pp. 390–91. 47 See Colorado Springs Gazette; June 8, 1878. 48 Bibb would be the only woman to serve in this position until 1939. See Jonas Viles, The University of Missouri Centennial History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1939). Bibb’s report of enjoying her work appears in her letter to William Torrey Harris, October 6, 1878; in William Torry Harris Papers, Missouri Historical. 49 Bibb married Thomas Sudborough, a businessman who had emigrated from England. 50 Bibb, Letter to Harris, January 28, 1884. 51 For some of the group’s criticisms of Rousseau, see Blow’s discussion of Rousseau as an atomist, and Harris’s criticism of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, referred to earlier in this study. For Harris’s invitation to Bibb to publish on Rousseau, see her letters to Harris, January 28, 1884, and February 7, 1884, William Torrey Harris Papers, St. Louis Historical Society Archives. 52 Grace Bibb, “Lady Macbeth: A Study in Character,” Western Review, vol. 1 (1875), p. 290. 53 Ibid., p. 291. 54 Ibid., p. 290. 55 Ibid., p. 291. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p. 295. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Snider, Western Review, vol. 1 (1875), p. 609. 62 Grace Bibb, “Women as Teachers,” Public Education Document, p. 2. This essay was originally published in the Journal of Education (St. Louis) and was made a part of the Public Education series, along with Brackett’s “How Not to Do It: The Art of Questioning.

206 NOTES

63 Ibid., p. 2–3 64 Ibid., p. 3. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 7. 68 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 69 Ibid., p. 8. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., p. 9. 72 Ibid. 73 See Anna Brackett, “Indian and Negro,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 60 (Sept 1880), pp. 627–30. See also Anna Brackett, “Charleston, South Carolina: 1861,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 88 (May 1894), pp. 943–50. 74 All references to Fanny Jackson Coppin’s relationship with the Calverts in this section are from her work Reminiscences Of School Life, And Hints On Teaching (Philadelphia: AME Books, 1913), pp. 16–17. 75 Biographical information for George Henry Calvert is from Maryland Historical Magazine, vol. 57, no. 2; p. 87. Calvert was a descendant of Lord Baltimore, whose family maintained political primacy in Maryland from the 1630s through the onset of the Revolutionary period. Elizabeth’s family claimed descent from Mary Queen of Scots. Her grandfather, George Hume Steuart, held several positions as a colonial politician in Maryland, while it was under the leadership of Charles Calvert, the Fifth Baron Baltimore. Both families owned sizable plantations with a combined total of nearly 250 human beings in forced servitude. 76 George Henry Calvert’s lack of interest in his father’s plantation may have originated in his deeply rooted sense of privilege. After his mother’s death, he learned that his inheritance might not provide sufficient income to allow him to live as a man of leisure and responded to this news with disappointment and anger. Granted, he was only a teenager and acting out of grief. His work ethic might have improved later in life, but he had no interest in managing the family’s plantation. His brother Charles Benedict Calvert, on the other hand, gained a high level of expertise in agriculture and launched the College of Agriculture in Baltimore, which later became the University of Maryland. 77 See Clark-Pujara and Christy Mikel, “Slavery, Emancipation, and Black Freedom in Rhode Island, 1652–1842,” doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa (2009), pp. 99–102. Most northern states had passed antislavery laws before 1800: Vermont (1777), Pennsylvania (1780), Massachusetts (1783), New Hampshire (1783), Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), New York (1799), New Jersey (1804); in the Northwest Territories, slavery was banned in 1787. Yet many

NOTES  207

antislavery laws provided for gradual emancipation, which allowed slavery to persist in states like Rhode Island well into the nineteenth century. 78 A school in Newport was named for Calvert in 1887, and biographical sketches say he served on the city’s school committee, but its records prior to the late 1870s are scant, so I have not been able to determine his years of service. Calvert does not appear as a member in committee reports issued in 1844, 1848, or 1856. Note that Newport did not desegregate the schools until after a decade of agitation by African American activists and the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson had become committee chair. See Erik Chaput and Russell J. DeSimone, “The End of School Segregation in Rhode Island,” Small State Big Histo​ry—ht​tp://​small​state​bighi​story. com/​end-s​chool​-dese​grega​tion-​rhode​-isla​nd/ 79 George Henry Calvert, Scenes and Thoughts in Europe, 2nd ed. (1855), p. 72. These are claims that he reasserted in the 1863 edition, relating it to slavery and the Civil War; pp. 102–05. Here he argued that the war was a white contest over democratic principles, not an effort to eradicate slavery. 80 George Henry Calvert, The Gentleman (Boston: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1866), p. 147. 81 Review of “The Gentleman” in The Atlantic, June, 1863; pp. 787–88. 82 Fanny Jackson Coppin, Reminiscences, p. 17. 83 See “The Second University of Maryland,” in History of Education in Maryland, by Bernard O. Steiner, pp. 138–42; #19 in Contributions to American Educational History, Herbert B. Adams, ed.; US Bureau of Education Government Printing Office, 1894; (available in GoogleBooks). See also “A Complete View of Baltimore,” by Charles Varle (1833), p. 27 (available in GoogleBooks). 84 Sources indicate that Henry James, Sr., and George Henry Calvert were well acquainted and list others in their social/intellectual circle. See Krister Dylan Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), p. 31. Henry James, Sr., was known to include his children in discussions and debates with adults. See Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 403–04. 85 Coppin, Reminiscences, p. 21. 86 Ibid., p. 17. 87 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 88 Ibid., p. 126. 89 Ibid., p. 124. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., pp. 129–30.

208 NOTES

92 Ibid., pp. 131–32. 93 For data about women educators in each country, see Grace Bibb, “Women as Teachers,” cited previously, p. 4; Kari Dehli, “They Rule by Sympathy: The Feminization of Pedagogy” Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 199-200; Patience Alexandra Schell, Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), p. 6. 94 Some examples of women who crossed the US/Canadian border to teach—sometimes more than once: the Shadd sisters: Mary Ann, Eunice, Emmaline, and Elizabeth, who were all involved in abolitionism before the US Civil War and in education before, during, and after the war. Mary Ann and Eunice were educated at Howard University— Mary Ann in law and Eunice in medicine—and both seem to have stayed in the United States. Emmaline lived on either side of the border of Michigan and Ontario after the war. Elizabeth remained in Ontario and was influential in Baptist religious circles. Dorcas Clark graduated from Toronto Normal School (1850) and was head mistress of the girls’ model school there (1852–65). She then relocated to California where she was an associate principal of the Baptist College of Petaluma (1865–67), a teacher at San Jose Normal School (1868–74), and vice principal of San Francisco Girls High School (1874–88). Source: Toronto Normal School Jubilee Celebration, 1897, pp. 15–17. Alice Maud Dunning Grant (née Fitch) was the second woman to earn a bachelor’s degree and the first woman to earn a master’s degree at Acadia University in Nova Scotia (1885 and 1886). She taught at Acadia Ladies Seminary (1889–93), was principal at Moulton College (1893–96), then taught in Santa Barbara, California, for two years before returning to Acadia Ladies Seminary, where she taught until 1925. Source: Grant and Fitch family fonds, Acadia University archives. Ada Marean Hughes graduated from New York State Normal School in Albany (1868), taught at a private school in Toronto (1874–82), then taught kindergarten methods at Toronto Normal School (1885–1900). Source: Kindergarten Magazine, vol. 17. Mary Kingsley Tibbits earned a degree at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, in 1890 and taught in Gagetown, New Brunswick (1890–94), before crossing the border to teach in Medford, Massachusetts (1897–98), and the Minot School (1898–1904) and West Roxbury (1904–06) schools in Boston. Source: Bryn Mawr alumni catalog (1906), p. 251. Scores of women also served as educators in and through missionary work among indigenous people in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. 95 Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Emmaline Shadd (1835–94) were the first and seventh of thirteen children born to Abraham and Harriett Shadd in Delaware. Mary Ann’s career path is well documented in Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). Emmaline’s life and work is not as well chronicled, but documents show that she graduated from Toronto Normal School (1855), taught in a Gaelic-speaking community near Toronto (ca. 1860–61), married Rev. Henry Simpson (1862), taught at a Freedmen’s School in Savannah, Georgia (ca. 1872–76), and returned to Raleigh, Ontario, by 1880. Emmaline is said to have been killed in an accident with a train in the 1894. Mary Ann’s status as an alumna of Howard University has been documented, but claims that Emmaline taught at Howard University are yet to be

NOTES  209

confirmed. Several members of the Shadd extended family attended Howard, and Emmaline may have been confused with Eunice P. Shadd, who earned a normal school certificate at Howard, completed a medical degree there, and may have taught at this institution, or Amelia Shadd who also studied at Howard. Sources: Toronto Normal School registration document for 14th session of the Normal School, May 1855 from Archives of Ontario; Toronto Normal School Jubilee Celebration, 1897 via Google Books; Emmaline’s marriage record on Ancestry. com and birth records for two of her children, Charles and Mattie; Edgar-André Montigny, Anne Lorene Chambers, and Lori Chambers, eds., Ontario Since Confederation: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 38, note 58. 96 Information about Anne Quinlan is from W.D. Hamilton, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol.15 (1921–30): http:​//www​.biog​raphi​.ca/e​n/bio​/quin​lan_a​nne_1​5E.ht​ml. Information about Onésime Dorval is from Estelle D’Almeida, Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan: https​://es​ask.u​regin​a.ca/​entry​/dorv​al_on​esime​_1845​-1932​.jsp. Information about Elizabeth Barrett is from GayleSimpson, “Alberta Women in the United Church of Canada,” Alberta and NorthwestConference Historical Society, (Nov. 2010): http:​//uni​tedch​urchh​istor​y.blo​gspot​.com/​2010/​11/al​berta​-wome​n-in-​ unite​d-chu​rch-o​f.htm​l. 97 The first normal school in Mexico was established in 1824. A number of Mexican normal schools admitted women in this era: San Luis Potosi (1868), Guanajuato (1870), Puebla (1879), Nuevo Leon (1881), Queretaro (1885), Xalapa (1888), Tamaulipas (1890), Mexico City (1890), and Coahuila (1894). The normal school in Nuevo Leon awarded teaching certificates to nearly 200 students before 1900—20 percent of them to women. See Women and Teaching: Global Perspectives on the Feminization of a Profession, by R. Cortina, S. San Román, Sonsoles San Romá (2006), p. 251; El estado de Veracruz-Llave ...: sus historia, agricultura, comercio é industrias, en inglés y español, John Reginald Southworth (1900); digitized 2012, p. 31—available in GoogleBooks. 98 Ramos y Duarte taught at the normal school in Orizbo before relocating to Yucatán. Fay served as head of the English department at the school and led this tour of US schools after six years at Xalapa. See School Journal, vol. 60 (1900), pp. 659 and 686. 99 Information about the lives and careers of Rita Cetina Gutiérrez and her colleagues is from Rosa Maria González Jiménez, “The Normal School for Women and Liberal Feminism in Mexico City in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” Resources for Feminist Research (Toronto, 2012), vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 33–55. 100 Rita Cetina Gutiérrez’s tutor was Felix Ramos y Duarte, a friend and colleague of Enrique Rébsamen who worked with him at the normal school in Orizbo, before relocating to the Yucatán Peninsula. Gutiérrez appears in a fictional work, Treasures in Heaven, by Kathleen Alcalá, as a much-loved teacher with high expectations. Interestingly enough, so does Anna Brackett; in her case, the book is Roller Skates, by Ruth Sawyer, which won a Newberry Medal in 1937. Information about Mexico’s early feminists is from Lucrecia Infante Vargas et al., Las Maestras de Mexico (The Teachers of Mexico, vol. I, 2015 and Piedad Peniche Rivero. Rita Cetina, La

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Siempreviva y el Instituto Literario de Niñas: una cuna del feminismo mexicano, 2015 (Rita Cetina, La Siempreviva, and the Literary Institute for Girls: A Cradle of Mexican Feminism), both published in Mexico City by the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Historicos de las Revoluciones de Mexico, 2015. 101 See González Jiménez, “The Normal School for Women and Liberal Feminism in Mexico City,” pp. 42–43. 102 Ibid., p. 41. 103 Ibid., p. 37. 104 González Jiménez, “The Normal School for Women and Liberal Feminism in Mexico City,” pp. 42–43. 105 See Julio Jaime Julia, Las discípulas de Salomé Ureña escriben (Santo Domingo: Editorial Ciguapa, 2001). For a brief overview, see “El Instituto de Señoritas inicia sus actividades,” Vanguardia del Pueblo: https​://va​nguar​diade​lpueb​lo.do​/1881​/01/ 0​3/el-​insti​tuto-​de-se​norit​as-in​icia-​sus-a​ctivi​dades​/. 106 “La Escuela Normal y el Instituto de Señoritas,” Revista de Educación. (A collection of speeches by Eugenio María de Hostos y Bonilla and Salomé Ureña de Henríquez as directors of the Escuela Normal and the Instituto de Señoritas respectively, along with articles and addresses in their honour.) Santo Domingo, 1933. 107 See Maria del C. Garcia Padilla, “Ana Roqué de Duprey: Let Us, Sisters, Make Another Life,” in Women’s Philosophies of Education: Thinking Through Our Mothers, Connie Titone and Karten E. Maloney, eds. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/ Prentice Hall, 1999), pp. 43–72. 108 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 109 Ibid., p. 49. 110 Ibid., p. 50. 111 Ron Gorman, “Frances Jackson Coppin—From Slavery to Trailblazer,” Oberlin Heritage Center Blog, https​://ww​w.obe​rlinh​erita​gecen​ter.o​rg/bl​og/20​15/12​/fran​cesj​ackso​n-cop​pin-f​rom-s​laver​y-to-​trail​blaze​r. 112 Maria del C. Garcia Padilla, “Ana Roqué de Duprey,” p. 50. 113 Ibid., p. 52.

Chapter 4 1 The full title of Walker’s “Appeal” was: An Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly,

NOTES  211

to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829. 2 Christine Ladd Franklin taught at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s but did so on a part-time basis. Mitchell was listed in annual catalogs at the University of Denver, which was noted in my earlier work on her life and career. Descendants of her family and local historians, Jill Ladd, Sharon LaDuke, and Robert Papworth brought my attention to the fact that she taught at Syracuse; Mitchell appears in annual catalogs at that institution as well. 3 Caroline K. Sherman suggested several women as potential speakers at the philosophy and science sessions of the Columbian Exposition: Julia Ward Howe, Gertrude Garrigues, Marietta Kies, and Mitchell who she said “has merit, but . . . does not arouse an audience.” See Sherman’s letter to Thomas Davidson, October 27, 1892, in Thomas Davidson Papers, Beinecke Library Archives, Yale University. 4 Sarah Josepha Hale, the prominent editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, recognized Mercer in one of the first biographical dictionaries of women published in the Americas, Woman’s Record in 1853. 5 In the 1820 census, ninety-three slaves were listed in the Mercer family household; it appears that she inherited far fewer slaves after her father’s death. 6 Mercer’s mother died in 1812. After her father died, it appears that she had to free the family’s slaves over time while paying off her father’s debts—about $17,000 worth, the equivalent of over $400,000 today. She also may have paid wages to former slaves when she needed their services after she established her school. 7 Caspar Morris, Memoir of Margaret Mercer (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1848), pp. 113–14. 8 The idea of “recolonizing” slaves in African was popular across the political spectrum at first. Even the liberal Gerrit Smith, Mercer’s correspondent for a time, who became devoted to abolition and harbored runaway slaves in his home, initially supported the idea. He proposed to raise $100,000 for recolonization by recruiting 100 donors who would give $100/year each for a ten-year period. See “A Statement of Facts Respecting the American Colonization Society” (Massachusetts Colonization Society, 1831), p. 13. 9 Sources for family information and the fate of Mercer’s emancipated slaves, who traveled on the ship Harriet and arrived in Liberia in March 1829: Manifests for “colonization” ships to Liberia provided on genealogy sites, like: https​://cc​harit​y.com​ /cont​ents/​roll-​emigr​ants-​have-​been-​sent-​colon​y-lib​eria-​weste​rn-af​rica/​emigr​ants-​ to-li​beria​-ship​-list​s/shi​pharr​iet18​29/ and census records in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. in Ancestry.com; census records in Africa, using location search terms: Liberia, Monrovia, and Cape Palmas in Ancestry.com. 10 Source: Immigration, travel, and census records in Ancestry.com. 11 Morris, Memoir of Margaret Mercer, p. 105.

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12 For a discussion of Taylor’s education and career, see Morris, Memoir of Margaret Mercer, pp. 105–09. Regarding Mercer’s social/political connections: Her cousins, Charles Fenton Mercer, Robert Selden Garnett, and James Mercer Garnett were congressmen who, no doubt, helped arrange for Taylor’s employment at political gatherings. Taylor’s instructor, Dr. Harvey Lindsley (1804–89), was a member of a prominent white family in the mid-Atlantic and southern regions of the United States to whom Mercer had access. Harvey Lindsley was educated at Princeton; became professor of medicine at the National Medical College in Washington, D.C. (now George Washington University Medical School); was president of the DC Board of Health (1833–1860s); and served a term as president of the American Medical Association. His brother, Philip Lindsley (1786–1855), was president of the University of Nashville (a predecessor of Vanderbilt University) from 1824 to 1850. Philip’s son, John Berrien Lindsley (1822–97), began his career as a Presbyterian minister, and the denomination’s Board of Domestic Missions appointed him to educate slaves and poor whites in Nashville. He later helped establish the medical school at the University of Nashville and served as the university’s chancellor after his father’s retirement—from 1855 to 1873. Late in his career, John Lindsley was superintendent of Nashville’s public schools. Despite his early work as an educator of African American youth, he maintained school segregation in Nashville in the decades after the US Civil War. See Lindsley family sketches in the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White, 1904), and the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Nashville, TN: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998). 13 Morris, Memoir of Margaret Mercer, p. 107. 14 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 15 Ibid., p. 115. 16 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 17 Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Sigourney are two of the more prominent women in the United States to have written books of moral instruction styled as “letters” to mothers and daughters. 18 Margaret Mercer, Popular Lectures on Ethics, or Moral Obligation for the Use of Schools (Petersburg, VA: Edmund & Julian C. Ruffin, 1841), p. xi. 19 Mercer, Popular Lectures on Ethics, p. xi. 20 Mercer, Popular Lectures on Ethics, p. 63. 21 Ibid., p. 67. 22 Both of the previous statements appear in Mercer, Popular Lectures on Ethics, p. 66. 23 Mercer, Popular Lectures on Ethics, p. 54. 24 Ibid., p. 59. 25 Ibid., pp. 194–95. 26 Ibid., p. 203.

NOTES  213

27 Ibid., pp. 203–04. 28 Ibid., p. 214. 29 Maria Stewart, “Farewell Address,” in Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 67–68. 30 Maria Stewart, “Lecture at Franklin Hall,” 1832, p. 45; “Farewell Address,” p. 67, both in Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). 31 Stewart, “Farewell Address,” p. 68. 32 Maria Stewart’s rhetorical style is sometimes referred to as the Black Jeremiad. See Marilyn Richardson, “Introduction” to Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 35. 33 A reference to the well-known passage in the Bible, I Corinthians 13:1; See Maria Stewart, “Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America,” in Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 55. 34 Marilyn Richardson, “Introduction” to Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 35. 35 A reference to passages in Proverbs 31 about the good wife. 36 Maria Stewart, “Lecture Delivered at Franklin Hall,” p. 45. 37 Maria Stewart, “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall,” in Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 61. 38 Stewart, “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall,” p. 57. 39 Ibid., p. 60. 40 Ibid., pp. 57–58. 41 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” in Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 31. 42 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” p. 37. 43 Stewart, “Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America,” p. 53. 44 Ibid., p. 54. 45 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” p. 29. 46 Often invoking this term for the purpose of inspiring and uniting her readers, Stewart promises that “Ethiopia” will rise, stretch out its hand, or gain God’s favor. See for

214 NOTES

example: “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” p. 43; “Address Delivered Before the African-American Female Intelligence Society of America,” p. 53; “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall,” p. 58 – all in Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Indiana University Press, 1987). 47 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” p. 30. 48 Stewart, “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall,” pp. 61–64. 49 Ibid., p. 61. 50 Stewart, “Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America,” p. 53. 51 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” p. 40. 52 Biographical information about Johnson is from a collection of her writings, edited by Carole Gerson and Veronica Jane Strong-Boag, E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. xiv–xvi. 53 See Margery Fee and Dory Nason’s introduction in Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2015). 54 Johnson, “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” p. 178; and Johnson, “The Iroquois Women of Canada,” p. 203, both essays appear in Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag, E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 55 Johnson, “The Lodge of the Law-makers,” in E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, eds. Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 216–17. 56 Johnson, “The Lodge of the Law-makers,” pp. 216–17. 57 Johnson, “The Iroquois Women of Canada,” p. 205; “Mothers of a Great Red Race,” p. 224, both in Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag, E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 58 Johnson, “Mothers of a Great Red Race,” in E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, eds. Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 225. 59 Johnson, “The Iroquois Women of Canada,” p. 204. 60 Johnson, “The Stings of Civilization,” in E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, eds. Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 283–84. 61 Johnson, “The Stings of Civilization,” p. 284. 62 Johnson, “Mothers of a Great Red Race,” p. 223; “Stings of Civilization,” p. 283.

NOTES  215

63 Johnson, “Mothers of a Great Red Race,” p. 224. 64 Johnson, “The Stings of Civilization,” p. 285. 65 Ibid., p. 287. 66 Johnson, “A Strong Race Opinion,” p. 183; Here Johnson refers to US figures who traveled and sometimes lived among indigenous peoples across the Americas: Historian Francis Parkman (1823–93) traveled among the Kennebec and Penobscot in Maine and the Oglala in Wyoming. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) lived among the Objiwe, marrying and working alongside a woman of Objiwe and Scottish heritage, Jane Johnston. Artist and writer George Catlin (1796–1872) depicted indigenous life across a wide range of territories in North America, visiting with the Pawnee, Omaha, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, and others. 67 Johnson, “A Strong Race Opinion,” p. 183; I have chosen to use Johnson’s exact terms here but have altered the statement somewhat for the sake of grammar and style. 68 Ellen Mitchell, “The Philosophy of Pessimism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 20 (1886), p. 194. 69 Ellen Mitchell, “A Study of Hegel,” presentation to the Congress of Women, Baltimore, Maryland (1884), p. 2; booklet in special collections at Brown University. 70 Mitchell, “A Study of Hegel,” pp. 2–3. 71 Ibid., pp. 5–6; 11–12; 15. 72 Ibid., p. 5. 73 Ibid., p. 6. 74 Ibid., p. 9. 75 Mitchell recognized the influence of these thinkers, but gave special recognition to William Torrey Harris, saying that he is the person “to whom I with many others am largely indebted for any knowledge I possess of Hegelian philosophy,” pp. 7, 14. Harris kept a copy of her essay in his library, which his family donated to Brown University after his death. 76 Article in Boston Evening Transcript, July 26, 1887, in scrapbooks of William Torrey Harris, special collections, Concord Free Library, Concord, Massachusetts. No page number provided. 77 Ellen M. Mitchell, “A Plea for Fallen Women,” Second World Congress of Women (Chicago, 1874), p. 3. 78 Ibid., p. 4. 79 Ibid., p. 9. 80 Ellen M. Mitchell, A Study of Greek Philosophy (Chicago: Griggs Publishing, 1891), p. vi.

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81 While reticent to cite myself (which a recent study has shown is common among women in academia), I addressed the problem of women’s legacy in the history of philosophy in “The Other Philosophy Club: America’s First Academic Women Philosophers,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Thought, vol. 24, no. 2 (Spring 2009; republished in a special virtual issue, “The Place of Women in the Profession,” Spring 2012), pp. 164–85. Regarding the gender gap in self-citations: “between 1779 and 2011, men cited their own papers 56 percent more than did women. In the last two decades . . . men self-cited 70 percent more than women. Women are also more than 10 percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous work at all” (emphasis mine). See Molly King et al., “Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-Citation Across Fields and over Time,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, December 8, 2017; https​://do​i.org​/10.1​177/2​37802​ 31177​38903​.

Chapter 5 1

Felix Matos, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out, by Luisa Capetillo (Houston: Arte Publico, 2004), p. xxxiii.

2

Career information for Charles H. Ames (1847–1911) is from his obituary in Publishers’ Weekly, September 16, 1911, p. 1025.

3 See Lucia Ames Mead (1856–1936) and the American Peace Movement, John M. Craig (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990). 4

See Lucia Ames Mead’s letters to William Torrey Harris: September 20, 1878, discussing Kant and Hegel; November 25, 1892, expressing concerns about adequately addressing both environmental issues and African American education; June 9, 1894 and November 11, 1894, reporting how much she enjoyed addressing practical issues, like economic inequality, at the Plymouth School of Ethics, coordinated by socialist, Henry Carter Adams (one of Marietta Kies’s advisors, mentioned in volume two). In William Torrey Harris Papers, Houghton Library Archives, Harvard University.

5 Proceedings of the Conference of the League to Enforce Peace, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, June 17, 1915. 6 Ames Mead, presentation to the American Institute of Instruction in Montreal, 1907, pp. 3 and 5. 7 I employ the term “moral equivalents of war,” although Ames Mead did not use the term herself in this passage. Both Jane Addams and William James discussed the need for “moral equivalents of war” just after 1900. It appears that Addams first used the term “moral substitutes for war” in a speech in 1903, and James altered the term; his work “Moral Equivalents of War” was published in 1910. See Berenice A. Carrol and

NOTES  217

Clinton F. Fink, Introduction to their new edition of Addams’ Newer Ideals of Peace, pp. xxvi–xxxiii (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 8 Lucia Ames Mead, Patriotism and the New Internationalism (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1906), pp. 47–48. 9 Ibid., p. 45. 10 Lucia Ames Mead, “The Sole Remedy for War,” World Unity Magazine, reprint #12, n.d. (ca. 1935), p. 4. 11 Mead, Patriotism and the New Internationalism, p. 4. 12 Ibid., p. 5. 13 Ibid., 36–37. 14 Charlene Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 15 May Wright Sewall, ed. (1915), Women, World War, and Permanent Peace (Chicago: John Newbegin), pp. 15–17. 16 Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, Illinois edition, Carroll and Fink, eds. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 130. 17 Ibid., p. 131. 18 Ibid. 19 Two excellent accounts of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s life, which I draw on for biographical information: Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) and Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Amistad/Harper Collins, 2008). 20 In 1879, Shaw/Rust had six instructors and 270 students overall. While Shaw/ Rust had a “normal department” with thirty-five students enrolled in 1878–79, Holly Springs Normal School, also established to educate African Americans, was the primary venue for teacher training. In 1878, Holly Springs Normal School had three teachers and just under ninety students, two-thirds of them female. See Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1880, pages xlii and 134, respectively. See also Henry Kiddle and Alexander Jacob Shem, Yearbook of Education, 1878–79 (New York: E. Steiger, 1878), vol. 1, p. 127. 21 Alfreda M. Duster, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. xxvii. 22 African American women in journalism before 1900 include Maria Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Delilah Beasley. White women in journalism in this period include Margaret Fuller and Gail Hamilton. 23 Duster, Crusade for Justice, p. 31.

218 NOTES

24 Ibid., p. 35. 25 Ibid., p. 47. 26 Ibid., pp. 47–52. 27 Ibid., p. 14. 28 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, p. 15. 29 Ibid., p. 109. 30 Ibid., p. 40. 31 Another common term is the “Black Jeremiad.” See Marilyn Richardson, “Introduction” to Maria Stewart: America’s First Black Political Writer, Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 35. 32 Note, for example, sessions at meetings of the American Philosophical Association in recent years, on Occupy Wall Street or the activity of groups like Concerned Philosophers for Peace, the establishment of the APA’s Committee on Public Philosophy and Black Issues in Philosophy; or see blogs by the Feminist Philosophers network and/or op-eds by philosopher-activists, like George Yancy. 33 Duster, Crusade for Justice, p. 51. 34 Wells-Barnett closed “The Red Record” with this list of suggestions. Ida B. WellsBarnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, pp. 222–24. Paula Giddings wellresearched biography of Wells-Barnett provides information about Henry Blair (1834-1920), a New Hampshire politician, and his efforts to counteract the racist policies and social structures that were in place in his day: Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), pp. 321, 347–48, 433–35. 35 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, pp. 39–40; 65. 36 Ibid., p. 171. 37 Ibid., pp. 166–72. 38 “The Red Record,” in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, p. 121; emphasis mine. 39 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, p. 28. 40 Ibid., p. 30. 41 Ibid., p. 178. 42 Ibid., pp. 33, 185. 43 Ibid., p. 22. 44 Wells-Barnett, “The Red Record,” pp. 182–83. 45 The observation that often men wish to be “not only protectors, but proprietors” of women was made by Myeisha Cherry in her paper, “Breaking Rules through Rage,”

NOTES  219

at the conference on Black Women’s Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center, March 16, 2019. 46 Wells-Barnett, “The Red Record,” pp. 188–90. 47 Ibid.: The claim that black women had “no finer feelings, nor virtue to be outraged” appears on p. 187. The statement “virtue knows no color line” appears in Wells-Barnett’s discussion on pp. 123–24. Wells-Barnett also notes that women’s virtue was ignored when African American women were victims of lynching: p. 195. 48 Ibid., p. 179. 49 This was the Edward Coy case in Arkansas, which Wells-Barnett recounts in great detail at points. For the report that his lover was coerced into accusing him, see Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, p. 22. More full accounts of this case appear on pp. 104–05 and 180–81 in the same volume. 50 Wells-Barnett, “The Red Record,” p. 117. 51 Ibid., pp. 118–19. 52 Wells-Barnett refers to the use of this type of terminology frequently in both “Southern Horrors” and “The Red Record.” See Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, pp. 45, 161. 53 Ibid., pp. 95–96; 103–04. 54 Ibid., p. 99. 55 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, pp. 103–04. 56 Credit for the term “intersectionality” goes to Kimberley Crenshaw who first coined the term in 1989. 57 This killing took place at Maud Post Office in Indian Territory—probably Powattamie County, Oklahoma. Wells-Barnett made sure to name the victims, per her usual practice: Lewis McGeesy and Hond Martin. “Burning Human Beings Alive,” in Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, p. 107. 58 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Shot an Officer,” in Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, pp. 77–78. 59 Wells-Barnett, Collected Works, Scholar Select reprint, p. 222. 60 Ibid., pp. 162–63. 61 Ibid., pp. 174–75. 62 Ibid., p. 210. 63 Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 228–30.

220 NOTES

64 Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Amistad/Harper Collins, 2008), pp. 515–17. 65 Tennessee State Supreme Court: Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad Company v Ida B. Wells. 1885. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, http:​//cdm​15838​.cont​entdm​.oclc​.org/​cdm/r​ef/co​llect​ion/p​15838​coll7​/id/2​83. 66 See Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Amistad/Harper Collins, 2008), pp. 5–6. 67 Biographical information for Capetillo comes from Felix V. Matos Rodriguez’s introduction to A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004). 68 “Mi Opinion” has been reissued with an excellent biographical and historical introduction by Felix V. Matos Rodriguez in A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004). 69 Luisa Capetillo, “Woman in the Home, in the Family, and in Government,” in Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, ed., A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004), p. 7. 70 Luisa Capetillo, “Woman in the Home, in the Family, and in Government,” pp. 11–13. 71 Ibid., p. 11. 72 The Oneida Community is one of the most well-known experiments in communal living and polygamous unions. Helen Worden, a member of the Oneida Community for many years, conceived three children by three different men while a resident there. Oneida Community papers are housed in special collections at Syracuse University: https​://li​brary​.syr.​edu/d​igita​l/gui​des/o​/Onei​daCom​munit​yColl​ectio​n/ umi​film.​html. 73 Capetillo, “Woman in the Home, in the Family, and in Government,” in Matos, A Nation of Women, pp. 24–25; 28–29. 74 Ibid., pp. 20–23. 75 Luisa Capetillo, “To My Daughter, Manuela Ledesma Capetillo,” in Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, ed., A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004), p. 59. 76 Luisa Capetillo, “To My Daughter, Manuela Ledesma Capetillo,” p. 67. 77 Ibid., p. 71. 78 Matos, Introduction to A Nation of Women, p. xxii. 79 Luisa Capetillo, “Special Excerpts,” in Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, ed., A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2004), p. 95. 80 Michele Moody-Adams made this observation in the presentation of her paper, “Repairing the Raft and Staying Afloat: Philosophy, Race, and Gender,” at the Black Women Philosophers conference, CUNY Graduate Center, March 16, 2019.

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INDEX

Abbott, Helene  29, 192 n.10, 198 n.63 abolition, abolitionists  3, 17, 89, 90, 101, 112, 125–6, 127, 147, 207 n.78, 208 n.94 absolute  108, 140, 142 academic philosophy  5–6, 9, 25, 114, 145–7 activism, see also social/political reform and philosophy  149–52, 187, 189 Adams, Henry Carter  153, 215–16 n.4 Adams, Michele Moody  189, 220 n.80 Addams, Jane  10, 20, 166, 216 n.7 life and career  162–3 community work  150, 151, 161 cross-cultural cooperation  162–3 and Lucia Ames Mead  153–46 pacifist views  157, 159, 160–1, 163–5, 187, 188 Africa and Fanny Jackson Coppin (South Africa)  19, 94, 97–100 and Margaret Mercer (Liberia)  115–8 and Maria Stewart  130–2 and Robert Charles (Liberia)  176–7 African American education, see Education, in African American communities African American unity, see pan-Africanism African Methodist Episcopal denomination  97, 166, 188 Alcott, Amos Bronson  139 Alcott, Louisa May  133 Alison, Archibald  114 altruism  1, 12, 86, 90, 157, 159, 163–4, 187 Ames, Charles  152

Ames Mead, Lucia  3, 7, 10, 20, 163, 172, 187, 188, 215–16 n.4 life and career  152–4 feminism  144–5, 154 internationalism  160–1 patriotism  159–60 peace education  150–1, 156–7, 161 Anthony, Susan B.  61, 147, 166, 180–1 Aristotle  2, 34, 114, 121, 139, 145, 153, 192 n.1 views of women  23, 60 Asian American education, see education, in Asian American communities assimilation  20, 48–9, 56–7, 129–30, 133–4, 137, 198 n.68 Atherton  191 n.5 Bakunin, Mikhail  183 Balch, Emily Green  153 Baldwin, Maria (educator)  29 Baldwin, Maria L. (lawyer)  50 Bancroft, George  91 Barnes, Eliza  27 Barnett, Ferdinand  164 Barnett, Ida B. Wells, see Wells-Barnett Barrett, Elizabeth  102 Bassi, Laura  127 Beasely, Delilah  217 n.22 Beecher, Catharine  11, 59–61, 147 Beecher, Lyman  127 Beedy, Mary  70, 75, 202 n.8 Berkeley, George  34 Bibb, Grace C.  3, 8, 10, 19, 20, 143 life and career  68, 82–3 on Lady Macbeth  83–5 race issues  87–8 women’s issues  85–7, 141, 144–5 Black Jeremiad  20, 213 n.32, 218 n.31, see also prophetic tradition

232 Index

Blackwell, Antoinette Brown  11 Blair, Henry (Senator)  171 Bloch, Jean de  153 Blow, Susan  2, 3, 8, 10, 28, 48, 52, 82, 153, 182 life and career  24, 26, 32, 33–4, 38 African American education  29–30, 57–8 epistemology and ontology  39–41, 197 n.40 Hegel, idealism  44–7, 61–2, 66, 70, 140–2 and John Dewey  46–7, 197 n.54 pedagogical theory  18–9, 25, 34–5, 38–9, 43–4, 46, 140–2, 196 n.33, n.34 teacher training  29, 51, 65–6 view of women  59, 61–2, 200 n.85 and William Torrey Harris  44–5 Bonnin, Gertrude  11, 50 Boston, early childhood education in  27–8, 29 Boston family (Liberia)  116–17 Brackett, Anna C.  3, 4, 7, 10, 19, 83, 86, 96, 105, 110, 139, 209 n.100 life and career  69–70, 202 n.6 feminism  75, 78–9, 86, 144–5 race issues  87–8 sex education  79–81 view of the family  76–7 women’s education  67, 77, 81, 87, 141–2 Brackett, Jeffrey Richardson  69 Bradwell, Myra  68, 201 n.1 Bronte sisters  165 Brooks, Charles  91 Brooks, Virginia  181 Brown, Thomas  114 Buck, Levisa Barnes  127 Bucknam, Ransford (Bucknam Pasha)  195 n.28 Burke, Edmund  114, 123, 124, 149 Burroughs, Nannie Helen  11 Butler, Joseph  114 Butler, Nicholas Murray  34

Cabot, James Eliot  70 Cabrera, Lydia  11 Caird, Edward  34, 142 Calvert, Elizabeth Steuart  89, 91, 92, 206 n.75 Calvert, George Henry  89–92, 206 n.75, 207 n.84, n.76, n.78, n.79 Campbell, Haydee (Moss)  29–30, 192 n.10, 198 n.63 Canada, see also Toronto Normal School early childhood education  27, 28, 48–9 political context  12–13 women of color  5, 11, 28, 133, 166 women’s career options  100–2 women’s education  6, 60, 67, 68, 103, 104 Capetillo, Luisa  5, 9, 10, 151 life and career  183–4 feminism  184–5, 188 social/political thought  20, 21, 109, 150, 186–7 Carlisle Indian School  37, 49 Carroll family (Liberia)  116–17 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd  18, 101–2, 166–7, 208 n.94, 208 n.95, 217 n.22 Cary, Thomas  167 Case, William  27 Castaneda, Estefania  30–1 Catlin, George  134, 137, 215 n.66 Catt, Carrie Chapman  153 Cavendish, Margaret  122 Cetina, Rita, see under Gutierrez Chang, M.T.  32 charity  120, 124–5, 132 charity schools  48, 58, see also mission schools Charles, Robert (lynching victim)  176–7 Cheney, Ednah Dow  11, 75 Cherry, Myeisha  218 n.45 Chicago education in  82, 103 social welfare in  161, 162, 163 Civil society  46, 47, 75, 76 Clark, Dorcas  208 n.94 Clarke, Edward H.  78–9, 204 n.34

Index

coeducation  68, 77, 92–3, 112 colonialism  9, 20, 69, 97–9, 102, 108–9, 123–5, 150, 188 colonization movement  115–18, 132, 176–7 Comte, August  19, 107, 183 Concord Summer School of Philosophy  75, 140, 143–4, 145, 153 consciousness  38–40, 42–3, 86, 142 Coolidge, Sherman  134 Cooper, Anna Julia  36, 166 Cooper, Sarah  58 Coppin, Fanny Jackson  5, 7, 8, 19, 35, 102, 110, 166 life and career  88–9, 92–4 and Calvert family  89–92 Institute for Colored Youth  68, 94 in South Africa  97–100 women’s issues  98–9, 110 Coppin, Levi  97, 100, 166 Correa, Dolores, see under Zapata Couzins, Phoebe  70 Coy, Edward (lynching victim)  219 n.49 Craig, Arthur  17 Cravath, Ruth  64 Crenshaw, Kimberley  219 n.56 critical race theory  1, 5, 6, 10, 21, 94, 129, 134, 150, 169, 175–6, 191 n.1 Crummell, Alexander  126 Cuenca, Laura Mendez  30–1 Davidson, Thomas  34, 70, 73, 75, 82, 143, 202 n.8, 211 n.3 Davison, Hope  73, 203 n.21 De Cora, Angel  37, 50 democracy, democratic ideals  65, 108, 157 In Ida B. Wells-Barnett  150, 170, 181, 183, 188 Denervaud, Marie  203 n.21 Descartes, Rene  114, 121 Detroit early childhood education in  29 and Shadd family  28, 166 Dewey, John

233

and Lucia Ames Mead  153, 159 and Susan Blow  34, 46–7, 197 n.54 Dodge, David Low  155 Dodge, Frances  198 n.63 domestic science, domestic education  59–60, 104, 136 domestic violence  98, 104, 136, 179 Dorval, Onésime  102 Douglass, Frederick  112, 126, 166, 175–6, 180–1 Douglass, Helen Pitts  181 Duarte, Felix Ramos y  103, 209 n.100 DuBois, W.E.B.  55–6, 130, 166 Duprey, Ana Roqué, see under Roqué Dyde, S.W. early translation of Hegel  192 n.2 Dykeman, Therese Boos  191 n.5 Early, Sarah  11 Eastman, Charles  134 Eaton, Rachel Caroline  199 n.82 Ecole Modèle (Quebec)  102 Edgeworth, Maria  114 education  45, 163, 183, 184, see also normal school; teacher education, teacher training in African American communities  24, 26, 28–9, 38, 46–7, 54–6, 57–9, 62–5, 68, 129, 169, 172, 176, 215–16 n.4 in Asian American communities  31, 32–3, 195 n.28 in Canada  27, 28 in China  31 early childhood  3, 6, 10, 18–19, 26–7, 33–4, 67 (see also kindergarten) early childhood - and assimilation  47–9, 53–4 early childhood - and philosophy  34, 38–9, 65–6 early childhood - and psychology  34, 35, 37, 71, 196 n.34 early childhood - cognitive and moral development in  38–40 early childhood - social purposes of  44–5

234 Index

in indigenous communities  24, 37, 38, 46–7, 48–50, 53–4, 57 in Mexico  26, 30, 103 and morality  119–20, 127, 128–30 and pacifism  156–7, 159, 161 in Puerto Rico  108–9 for women and girls  19, 68, 76, 94, 101, 105, 132, 141, 143, 147, 188 as women’s domain  23–5, 60–2, 67, 74, 81, 101 Elgin Settlement (Ontario)  28 Eliot, Charles Norton  73 Eliot, Charles W.  73 Eliot, Ida  72–3, 82, 203 n.19, 203 n.21 Eliot, Samuel  73 Eliot, William Greenleaf  4, 17, 73, 203 n.19 Ellwood, Ella, see Mitchell, Ellen M. emancipation, gradual  112–13, 206 n.77 Emancipation Proclamation  89 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  34, 70, 87, 139, 153 Entfaltung, see “unfolding” in education Epicurus  114 epistemology in Margaret Mercer  20, 120–2 in Susan Blow  19, 34–5, 38–40, 197 n.40 equality  69, 188, 215–16 n.4 gender  14, 20–1, 110, 143–4, 147, 151, 188 racial  16–18, 36, 38, 113, 126, 150, 170, 176 Escuela Normal de Xalapa  103 Ethical Culture Society  163 ethics  6, 20, 111, 114, 119, 147, 188 “Ethiopia” in Maria Stewart  131, 213 n.46 eurocentricism, see philosophy, Eurocentric bias in family  12, 47, 61–2, 76–7, 124, 142 Farfán, Cristina  103–4 Fay, Harriet  103, 209 n.98 Fellenberg, Philipp Emanuel von  118 Feltz, Leonor M.  105

feminism  1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 19–21, 94, 150, 185, 188, see also gender; Mitchell, Ellen M., women’s issues; womanism Canada  111 Ellen Mitchell  139 Jane Addams  162 liberal  19–20, 61, 68, 74, 79, 81, 110, 154 Lucia Ames Mead  154 maternal  8–19, 61–2, 74, 79, 83, 110, 114, 128, 136–7, 154 (see also women as mothers, caretakers) Mexico  103–4 Puerto Rico  183–4 St. Louis idealist movement  86, 143, 144–5 Feminist Congress (Baltimore, 1922)  105 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  11, 34, 69 Finney, Charles  127 First Nations (Canada)  102 Fisher, Laura  35, 196 n.33, 198 n.63 Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee)  64, 165 Fleming, F.J.  168, 169 Fort Macleod (Alberta)  102 Framingham Normal School (Massachusetts)  69 Franklin, Christine Ladd  211 n.2 Frederick Douglass Center (Chicago)  180–1 Freedmen’s Bureau Hospital (Washington, DC)  126 Freedmen’s Schools  88, 102, 165, 208 n.95 free love movement  185, 220 n.72 The Free Speech  168, 169 free will/determinism  120 Fretageot, Marie Duclos  26–7 Froebel, Froebelian theory  11, 18, 25–35, 37, 40, 49, 57, 66, 88, 196 n.33, n.34 Fruchte, Amelia  70 Fuller, Margaret  11, 34, 70, 139, 153, 217 n.22

Index

Gandhi, Mohandas  161 Gardner, Catherine Villanueva  191 n.5 Garnett, James Mercer  118, 212 n.12 Garnett, Kate (Noland)  118 Garrigues, Gertrude  211 n.3 Garrison, William Lloyd  112, 125, 127, 166 Garvey, Marcus  130 Gates, Henry Louis  4 gender and self-citations  216 n.81 gender complementarity  23–4, 60–1, 67, 128, 149 gender equality, see equality, gender genre, and women in philosophy  7–9, 150–2 George, Henry  34 German idealism, German thought  2–3, 11, 14–15, 18, see also idealism; neo-Hegelians; St. Louis idealist movement Anna Brackett  69–70, 78 Ellen Mitchell  20, 145 Fanny Jackson Coppin  88, 91 Margaret Mercer  121 Mary Church Terrell  36 Mexico  103 Susan Blow  34, 39 God, Divinity  2, 53, 78, 112, 129, 130, 143, 158 in Fanny Jackson Coppin  99 in Margaret Mercer  120, 121, 122, 123–5 in Maria Stewart  126–8, 131, 213 n.46 in Pauline Johnson  137 in Susan Blow  43, 140 Godey’s Book  30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  88, 91, 139 Goldman, Emma  7 Goucher College  32 Goulette, Emma Johnson  5, 10, 19, 24, 66, 134 life and career  37–8, 50, 196 n.39 indigenous education  50–2, 54–5 race issues  38, 52–3

235

vocation/culture debate  56–7 Grant, Alice Maud Dunning  208 n.94 Grape Island School  27 Greeley, Horace  91 Green, Ashbel (and Betsey Stockton)  193 n.11 Green, T.H.  142 Grimke, Angelina  11, 147 Grimke, Charlotte Forten  11 Grimke, Sarah  11, 147 Guanajuato normal school (Mexico)  30, 209 n.97 Gutiérrez, Rita Cetina  5, 68, 103–4, 105, 110, 209 n.100 Hailmann, Eudora  35, 49 Hailmann, William N.  35, 49–50, 54, 196 n.33 Haiti and revolution  112, 131–2 Haldane, Elizabeth, early translation of Hegel  196–97 n.40 Hale, Horatio  134 Hale, Sarah J.  59–61, 147, 210 n.4 Hallowell, Anna  196 n.39 Hamilton, Alexander  7 Hamilton, Gail (Mary Abigail Dodge)  217 n.22 Hammond, William  145–6 Harper, Frances Watkins  11, 166 Harper’s Monthly  69 Harris, William Torrey life and career  14–15 Anna Brackett  70, 71 Arthur Craig  17 Concord School  153 Ellen Mitchell  142, 145, 215 n.75 Grace Bibb  82, 83 Lucia Ames Mead  152–3, 215–16 n.4 race issues  15–17, 57 St. Louis idealism  3, 14, 28 Susan Blow  33–4, 35, 44–5, 196 n.33, 197 n.54, 198 n.63, 200 n.85 views of women  67, 103, 143, 202 n.8 William Hailmann  49 Harrison, Elizabeth  35 Hart, Caroline M.C.  35, 198 n.63

236 Index

Harvard University  73, 78, 91 Hazard, Rebecca  70, 202 n.8 Hearst, Phoebe  63 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  11, 25, 34, 41, 69, 71, 82, 110, 139, 149, 153, 197 n.40, 215–16 n.4 early translations of  192 n.2, 196–97 n.40 in St. Louis idealism  2, 14, 38–9, 40, 42, 46–7, 66, 70, 76, 107–8, 140–2, 145 view of family  61–2, 76–7, 124 view of women  2, 23, 60–1, 75, 76, 200 n.85 Hegelians, neo-Hegelians  15, 46–7, 75, 107–8, 145, see also German idealism; idealism Hiawatha  53, 135 Hill, Patty Smith  35, 65 Hoffman, Franz  70 Holly Springs normal school (Mississippi)  217 n.20 Holt, Hamilton  153, 156 Homer Academy  139 Hoodless, Adelaide Hunter  60 hooks, bell  94 Hostos, Eugenio Maria de  106, 183 Howard University  16, 17, 167, 194 n.14, 208 n.94, 208 n.95 Howe, Julia Ward  11, 113, 139, 147, 155, 204 n.34, 204 n.35, 211 n.3 Howison, George Holmes  34 Howland, Mary  27 Hubbard, Hester  27 Hughes, Ada Marean  28, 35, 207–8 n.94 Hugo, Victor  183 Hull House  162 Hume, David  34, 38, 121, 124 Hunter College  32 idealism, philosophical in St. Louis, Missouri  19, 38–9, 46–7, 66, 70, 75, 85–6, 141–2, see also German idealism; neo-Hegelians Illinois Equal Suffrage Association  181 imperialism  134, 155, 158

Indian boarding schools  24, 49–50, 54 “Indian girl” prototype  137–8 Indian removals  123, 155 indigenous beliefs and heritage  112, 113, 134–5, 147 indigenous education  47, 50–5, see also education, in indigenous communities indigenous rights  5, 13, 68, 123–4, 131 industrial training, industrial education  24, 46–7, 57, see also manual training infant schools  27, 48 Institute for Colored Youth (Philadelphia)  8, 37, 68, 92, 94, 196 n.39 Instituto de Senoritas (Dominican Republic)  105 Instituto Literario de Ninas (Mexico)  104 International Committee of Women for a Permanent Peace  36 internationalism  159, 163–4 International Kindergarten Union  65, 196 n.33 intersectionality  21, 138–9, 150, 177, 219 n.56 Iroquois culture and governance  133–6 Jackson, Andrew  123 Jackson, Fanny, see Coppin, Fanny Jackson James, Henry, Jr.  91 James, Henry, Sr.  91, 207 n.84 James, William  34, 91, 153, 157, 159, 216 n.7 Jameson, Anna Brownell (Murphy)  114 Jennings family (Liberia)  116–18 Jim Crow era  58, 62, 68, 165 Johns Hopkins  201 n.2 Johnson, Emma, see Goulette, Emma Johnson Johnson, E. Pauline  5, 10, 20, 50, 111, 112, 113, 114, 147 life and career  132–5 cultural identity  133 women’s rights issues  135, 137–8

Index

Johnson, Samuel  114 Johnston, Jane  215 n.66 journalism, journalists, women as  8, 9, 150, 151, 165, 166, 169–71, 172, 182 Journal of Education (Boston)  69 Journal of Education (St. Louis)  83 Journal of Speculative Philosophy  69, 70–1, 139, 140, 152 justice  21, 122, 124, 126, 149, 150, 170, 172, 184, 187, 188 Kant, Immanuel  3, 34, 38, 69, 139, 149, 153, 197 n.40 theory of peace  154–6, 159, 160, 187, 215–16 n.4 Kellogg, Laura Cornelius  11, 50, 134 Key, Ellen  153 Kies, Marietta  3, 86, 124, 153, 211 n.3, 215–16 n.4 kindergarten  3, 5, 24, 26, 53–9, 62, 66, 141, see also education, early childhood Boston, Massachusetts  27–8 Detroit, Michigan  29 funding for  58–9, 63–5 Louisville, Kentucky  65, 201 n.100 Philadelphia  94, 196 n.39 St. Louis, Missouri  29, 31, 44–5, 55 Kindergarten Union, see International Kindergarten Union King, Martin Luther  161 Knapp, Isaac  127 Kropotkin, Pyotr  183 Ladd, William  155 Lady Macbeth  83–5, 143 Lake Mohonk Conferences  154–6 Lancaster method  118 Lane Theological Seminary  127 Laubscher, Enrique  30 League of Nations  156, 158 League to Enforce Peace  156 Leidecker, Kurt  15 liberal arts education  54–6, 72, 118, see also vocation/culture debate liberal feminis, see feminism, liberal

237

The Liberator  125, 166 Liberia and colonization movement  115–18, 132, 176–7, 211 n.8, n.9 Lincoln, Abraham  162 Lincoln, Bertha  73, 203 n.21 Lincoln Institute (Missouri)  35 Lindsley, Harvey  117 London Mission School  32 lynching  21, 165, 168, 169, 170–7, 182, 200 n.92, 219 n.49, 219 n.57, see also vigilante violence McAlister  191 n.5 Macbeth, see Lady Macbeth McCulloch, Mary  35 McDougall, George  102 McGeesy, Lewis (lynching victim)  219 n.57 Machiavelli, Niccolo; Machiavellian politics  2, 159–60 McKinley, William  178 MacLure, William  26–7, 193 n.6 McTyeire School (China)  31 Mahowald, Mary Briody  192 n.1 Malatesta, Errico  183 Malato, Charles  183 male dominance, and racism  174–6, 177 Mann, Horace  86 “manual training”  46, 54, 118, see also industrial training, industrial education Martin, Hond (lynching victim)  219 n.57 Martineau, Harriet  34 Marx, Karl  7 masculine ideals, values  7, 12, 18, 24, 70, 84, 113, 146, 148, see also philosophy, masculine bias in maternal views of women, see feminism, maternal Mather, Sarah  54, 198 n.68 Matos, Felix  9 Mead, Edwin Doak  152

238 Index

Mead, Lucia Ames, see Ames Mead, Lucia Mendoza, Mercedes Laura Aguiar  105 Mercer, A.G.  91 Mercer, Margaret  2, 7, 8, 10, 20, 111, 128, 146, 182 life and career  114–16 colonization movement  115–18 Elizabeth Calvert  91 God, Divinity  112, 114, 120–2, 123–4, 125 philosophy and ethics  114, 119–20 Sarah J. Hale  210 n.4 metaphysics  8, 34, 43, 66, 107, 120 Methodists, Methodism  27, 31, 102, see also African Methodist Episcopal Mexico early childhood education in  27, 30, 103, 193 n.6, n.7 higher education in  6, 31, 68, 103, 105, 209 n.97 political context  12–13 women and feminism in  5, 19, 67, 103–5 Mill, John Stuart  9, 149 Miller, Maria, see Stewart, Maria (Miller) mind  38–9, 42–3, 51, 66, 79, 86, 107, 141–2 mind/body problem  121–2 Minor, Virginia Minor v. Happersett  68, 70, 201 n.1, 202 n.8 mission schools, missionary schools  18, 27, 31–2, 48–9, 102, 117 missions work, women in  94, 97, 99–100, 102 Missouri Woman’s Suffrage Association  70, 202 n.8 Mitchell, Ellen M.  3, 7, 211 n.3, 215 n.75 life and career  139–40, 210 n. 2 academic philosophy  8, 10, 111, 112, 145–7 Hegel, idealism  20, 140–2 race issues  113 women’s issues  114, 143, 144–5

Mitchell, Joseph  139 Montezuma, Carlos  134 moral agency  38–9, 40, 44, 80–1, 109 moral development  43–5, 50, 76–7, 119–23, 127, 128–30, 185 “moral equivalents for war”  157, 163, 216 n.7 moral philosophy, moral theory  19, 20, 24, 34, 119 More, Hannah  114 Morley Mission (Alberta)  102 Morris, George Sylvester  34, 145 Moss, Maurine  168 Moss, Thomas (lynching victim)  168, 170, 200 n.92 Mossell, Gertrude Bustill  217 n.22 Moten, Lucy  11 mothers in Iroquois culture  137–8 and sex education  79–81 as teachers  24, 26, 59, 62, 64, 128 mothers’ clubs  36, 59, 63, 65 Mott, Lucretia  147 M Street School  17, 36 Murray, Anna  58–9, 64 Murray, Daniel  118 Murray, Judith Sargent  11 Musquiz, Ramon  193 n.6 Nashoba utopian community  185 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  51, 163 National Association of Colored Women  29, 36 National Association of Negro Teachers  30 National Council of Women  64 National Education Association  14, 81 National University (Chicago)  35 Native American education  28, 46–55, 64, see also education, in indigenous communities Native Americans, vigilante violence against  177 Neef, Joseph  26 negation  40, 41–2, 140

Index

neo-Hegelians  15, 46–7, 86, 107 New Harmony utopian community  26–7 New Jersey, slavery in  193–4 n.12, 194 n.11, 206 n.77 New Lanark utopian community  48 Niel, Harriet  198 n.63 Nightingale, Rev. F.  168 normal schools  8, 83, 96, 152 African American education  19, 55, 68, 72, 81, 87, 88, 92, 94, 97, 207 n.78 Canada  24, 28, 101–2, 208 n.94, 208 n.95 Institute for Colored Youth  96–7 Mexico  5, 30, 103–4, 209 n.97 Native American education  49, 51–2 Puerto Rico  5, 68, 106 St. Louis, Missouri  55, 67–8, 69, 71, 82 women’s higher education  6, 8, 72, 73–5, 86–7, 101 North American Review  73 Nuevo Leon normal school (Mexico)  103 Oberlin College  16, 29, 36, 88, 92, 93, 94, 127, 192 n.10 object lessons  28, 71–2 Olmstead, Denison  114 Oneida utopian community  185, 220 n.72 ontology  8, 19, 34, 39–40, 119 Owen, Robert  48 Pack, Frances Farnam  63 Padilla, Maria del C. Garcia  106, 110 Padillo, J. Antonio  193 n.6 Paley, William  114 pan-Africanism  51–2, 126–7, 130–1 pan-Indianism  51–2 Parker, Arthur  134 Parker, Theodore  17 Parkman, Francis  134, 215 n.66 Pascal, Blaise  114 patriotism  125, 156, 159–60 Patterson, Mary  93

239

Peabody, Elizabeth  11, 27–8, 29, 34, 139 Peabody, Katrina Trask  63 peace, pacificism  3, 8, 12, 20, 36, 133, 150, 151, 154–5, 158, 162–4, 187, 188 peace education  150, 156–7, 161 pedagogy, pedagogical theory, see also education child-centered  25–6 and empowerment  109–10 in philosophical idealism  38–40, 70–2, 75 student-centered  94–5 and women/feminism  1, 2, 6, 10, 12, 23–5, 101–2, 161 Pellerano, Luisa Ozema  105 Penn, Garland  166 Perdomo, Altagracia Henriquez  105 Pestalozzi, Johann  25, 26–8, 29, 30, 48, 66, 71, 86, 88 Philadelphia, education in  26, 27, 35, 37, 53, 68, 94, 103 Philosophical Review  145–6 philosophy, see also masculine ideals, values definition of  2, 5, 7, 8, 9–10, 25, 149, 152, 187 Eurocentric bias in  1, 4, 5, 9, 15, 66, 182 George Henry Calvert  90 masculine bias in  1, 5, 9, 21, 25, 66, 147, 149, 182 professionalization of  145–6 (see also academic philosophy) by women  1–2, 5–11, 25, 140–1, 146–7, 161, 163, 191 n.5 philosophy of activism  170, 172 philosophy of education, see education; pedagogy, pedagogical theory Pima Indian School (Arizona)  37 Pine Ridge school  198 n.68, (South Dakota) 54 Pizan, Christine de  2, 109 Plato  34, 114, 139, 145, 146, 150, 153, 182

240 Index

play, playtime and education  25–2, 48, 53 in Anna Brackett  71 in Fanny Jackson Coppin  95 in Mary Church Terrell  56 in Susan Blow  18, 41, 42–3, 45, 46 Plummer, Mary  181 Plymouth School of Ethics  153, 215–16 n.4 positivism  107, 110, 140 Pou, Catalina  105 poverty  63, 124, 163, 186 and education  48, 57, 118 Pratt, Richard  49, 198 n.68 Presbyterianism  188, 212 n.12 primary education, see early childhood education Primary Teachers Training School (Oswego, NY)  28 Primer Congreso Feminista (Mexico City, 1916)  105 Princeton University  91, 193 n.11 private life, private realm, private sphere  2, 46–7, 147, 184, 191 n.2, see also “women’s sphere” Progressive era  46, 55 progressive thought, progressivism  13, 35, 48, 79 and early childhood education  49–51, 65 at Oberlin  92–3 and social/political issues  98, 108, 125, 159, 164, 179 Prohibition  98, 179 property  122, 123–4 prophetic tradition, prophetic voice  7, 128, 131, 147, 164, 169–70 prostitution  144, 179 Provincial Freeman  166, 167 Provincial Institute (Puerto Rico)  106 psychology, see education, early childhood - and psychology public intellectuals  9, 146, 151, 165, 188

public life, public realm, public sphere  46–7, 60–1, 76–7, 79, 128, 147, 149, 150, 184, 191 n.2 Puello, Ana Josefa  105 Putnam, Alice  35, 196 n.33 Quakers, Quaker tradition  133, 188, 193 n.11 Quapaw School (Oklahoma)  37 Quinlan, Anne  102 race issues  1, 7, 10, 38, 58, 64, 110, 113, 126, see also critical race theory and Emma Johnson Goulette  52–4 and Fanny Jackson Coppin  96–7, 110 and Frederick Douglass  175–6 and George Henry Calvert  89–92 and Ida B. Wells-Barnett  169–72, 176–80, 181–2 and Maria Stewart  130–2 and Mary Church Terrell  57–9, 62 and Pauline Johnson  133, 138–9 in St. Louis idealist movement  4, 15–18, 29, 51, 57 and Susan B. Anthony  180 racist violence  166–9, 171–3, 176–8, see also lynching; vigilante violence, vigilantism The Radical  70 Ramirez, Sara  11 rape myth  168–75 reason  107, 110, 140, 158 Rébsamen, Enrique  30, 103–4, 209 n.100 reconstruction  4, 13 Red River Settlement (Winnipeg)  102 Reel, Esther  50, 54 reformers, see social reform Reid, Thomas  114 religion  1, 6, 7, 8, 10, 187, 188, see also God, Divinity and Fanny Jackson Coppin  97, 99, 100 and Jane Addams  163, 164 and Luisa Capetillo  187, 188 and Margaret Mercer  114, 115, 122

Index

and Maria Stewart  114, 126–9, 147 and Pauline Johnson  137, 147 and Susan Blow  41 as women’s domain  6, 11–12, 147 Remond, Sarah  11 reservation schools, residential schools  6–57, 24, 48–9, 54, 55, see also education, in indigenous communities Rhode Island education and intellectual life  56, 88, 89, 91, 92, 207 n.78 slavery and segregation  89, 112–13, 206 n.77 Rhode Island State Normal School  35, 92 Rice Station School (Arizona)  37 Richards, Fannie  28–9 Ripley, George  91 Rockford Seminary (Illinois)  162 Rollings, Henry (Liberia)  116–17 Romanticism, see German idealism, German thought Root, Clara  60, 199 n.82 Roqué, Ana  5, 10, 19–20, 68, 105, 110, 183 life and career  106–7 and colonialism  108–9 and Comte’s thought  107–8 Rosenkranz, Karl  11, 70, 71, 75–6, 77–8, 82 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  2, 25, 34, 82, 83, 153, 183 Royce, Josiah  34 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre  11, 166, 217 n.22 Ryerson, Adolphus Egerton  103 Sage Hall, Cornell University (New York)  73 St. Louis, Missouri  14–15, 31, 93, 103, 142 African American education in  15–18, 29–30, 55, 57, 59, 66, 77, 88

241

early childhood education in  28, 29, 44–5 feminism in  72–5, 85–7 and philosophy  69, 70–1, 82, 139, 140–1, 145 teacher training in  67–8, 69, 71–5 vocation/culture debate in  54–5 St. Louis idealist movement, see idealism; neo-Hegelians St. Louis Ladies Magazine  69, 202 n.6 St. Louis Philosophical Society  14, 75, 82 St. Louis public schools, see education, early childhood; normal school St. Michael’s Academy (St. John, New Brunswick)  102 Salem State Normal School (Massachusetts)  152 San Francisco, early education in  30, 31, 32–3, 58, 195 n.28 Sanger, Margaret  79 San Juan Normal School Puerto Rico  106 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph  11, 34, 69 Schiller, Friedrich  91, 165 Schlegel, Friedrich  114 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe  134, 137, 215 n.66 Schopenhauer, Arthur  140 Schurz, Carl  26 Schurz, Margarethe  26, 28 Scott, Dred  3 Scottish Enlightenment  122 Second Great Awakening  126–7 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria  147, 191 n.2, 212 n.17 Seigfried, Charlene  162 Selbstattigkeit, “self-activity”  39, 40, 41, 42, 43 self-consciousness  38–9, 40, 42, 43, 142 self-estrangement  40, 41, 42 Seneca Indian School (Oklahoma)  37 Sewall, May Wright  153, 154, 163–4 sex education  78–81, 202 n.11 sexism  10, 110

242 Index

sexual double standard  144, 185 sexuality  20, 82, 174, 185, 186 Shadd, Amelia  166 Shadd, Emmeline  28, 101–2, 194 n.14, 208 n.94, 208 n.95 Shadd, Mary Ann, see Cary, Mary Ann Shadd Shadd family  28, 194 n.14, 208 n.94, 209 n.95 Shakespeare, William  85, 158, 165 Shaw University  165, 217 n.20 Sherman, Caroline K.  153, 211 n.3 Sia, Ruby  32 Sibree, John, early translation of Hegel  196–7 n.40 Siempreviva  104 Sierra, Justo  195 n.21 Sigourney, Lydia  59–60, 114, 147, 212 n.17 Silone, Josephine, see Yates, Josephine Silone Six Nations (Iroquois)  132, 135–6 Slade, Ellen M., see Mitchell, Ellen M. slaves, slavery  4, 13, 90, 91, 92, 131–2, 146, 155, 167, 175–6, 207 n.79 and Margaret Mercer  112, 113, 115–18 in the northeastern U.S.  193–4 n.12, 206 n.77 Slossen, May Preston  146 Smiley, Albert  154 Smith, Adam  114, 124 Smith, Ellen M., see Mitchell, Ellen M. Smith, Gerrit  112, 211 n.8 Snider, Denton  85, 93 socialism  21, 185–6 social/political issues  10, 12, 69, 103, 113, 127, 129, 132, 215–16 n.4 social/political theory  1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 20, 34, 133, 135, 149, 182–3, 189 social reform  20, 48, 58, 147, 149, 150, 181 social work, social services  59, 69, 163 Sociedad Protectura de la Mujer (Mexico)  105

Society of American Indians  37, 50, 54, 134, 198 n.61 Soldan, Louis  70, 82 Somerville, Mary  114 Southern Workman  60, 198 n.61 Spencer, Anna Garlin  65 Spencer, Herbert  34, 108 “spiritual motherhood”  21, 64, 67 Squire, Belle  181 stages of learning  25, 40, 43, 71, 75–6, 122, 157 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady  61, 112, 147 Steinhauer, Henry Bird  102 Stewart, Dugald  114 Stewart, James W.  125 Stewart, Maria (Miller)  5, 7, 8, 10, 18, 122, 166, 182, 217 n.22 life and career  125–6 pan-Africanism  130–1, 213 n.46 and prophetic voice  20, 170, 213 n.32 and religion  114, 122, 126–7 and social/political issues  111, 112–3, 129–30 and women’s issues  127–8 Stirling, James Hutchinson  70, 139, 142 Stockton, Betsey  18, 27, 91, 193 n.10, n.11, n.12 Stone, Lucy  147 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  133 Sumner High School (St. Louis, Missouri)  77 Sunderland, Eliza J.  3, 73, 81, 144–5 sympathy  64, 86, 124–5, 179 Syracuse University  112, 140, 211 n.2 Tang, Ilien  31–2 Taylor, William (Liberia)  116–7, 212 n.12 teacher education, teacher training, see education; normal school Teachers College, Columbia University  31 Te-ata  113 Tekahionwake  50, 133 temperance  98–100, 129–30, 170, 179–80

Index

Terrell, Mary Church  5, 8, 10, 19, 24, 66, 93, 166, 200 n.92 life and career  36–8 and Jane Addams  162 poverty and education  58 racism  58–9 “self-activity”  40 vocation/culture debate  56 women as caretakers  62–3 Thayer, Rose  32–3, 195 n.28 Thompson, Mary Frances  113 Thoreau, Henry David  139, 153 Tibbits, Mary Kingsley  207–8 n.94 Tillman, Benjamin  178–9 Tillman, Katherine Davis  11 Tolstoy, Leo  153, 163, 183 Toronto, women and education in  71, 101, 166, 198 n.63 Toronto Normal School  24, 28–9, 102, 207–8 n.94 Tougas, Cecile  191 n.5 Toynbee Hall (London)  162 transcendentalism  70, 139 Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut)  73 Trout, Henry  178 Truth, Sojourner  34, 94, 147 Tsao, F.Y.  31 Tuskegee Summer School for Teachers Alabama  30 Tyson, Sara  192 n.8 “unfolding,” in education  19, 38, 44, 45, 48 Unitarianism  4, 17, 188 United Nations  156, 158 Universalism  127 University of Denver  8, 112, 140, 211 n.2 University of Maryland  91, 206 n.76 University of Michigan  73, 153 University of Missouri, Columbia  8, 68, 82–3 University of Puerto Rico  8, 68, 106 Upham, Thomas Cogswell  114 Ureña, Salome de  105–6, 108, 183

243

Vanderbilt, Edith Stuyvesant  63 Vanderwalker, Nina  196 n.34 Vashon family (educators)  192 n.10 Vassar College  73 Vera, A.  70 Victorian views of women  79–80, 98, 202 n.11, 204 n.35 vigilante violence, vigilantism  5, 21, 168–9, 171–2, 176, 178–9, see also lynching Virginia Female Institute  31 virtue and women  128, 130, 137, 144, 185 racist conceptions of  172–5, 177 vocation/culture debate, see also “industrial training”; “manual training” and Emma Johnson Goulette  56–7 and Josephine Yates  40–1 for poor and minority students  54–6, 60 and Susan Blow  46–7, 59 Voltaire  7, 183 Waithe, Mary Ellen  191 n.5 Wald, Lillian  166 Walker, David  112, 125, 132 Waring, Oscar  192 n.10 Washington, Booker T.  55–6, 166 Washington, Margaret Murray  64, 116 Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri)  73 Watts, Isaac  114 Webster, Noah  155 Wells-Barnett, Ida B.  2, 7, 10, 20, 188, 200 n.92 life and career  165–9 activism of  169–71 and Frances Willard  179–81 and Jane Addams  162 “radicalism” of  182 on rape myth  168–9, 171–5 and Susan B. Anthony  180, 181 women and virtue  172–5, 177 Wendell Phillips School (Kansas City)  36 Western Review  83, 85

244 Index

Wheelock, Lucy  35, 65 Whitefish Lake Mission (Alberta)  102 Wilberforce University (Ohio)  8, 36 Wilderspin, Samuel  27 Willard, Frances  147, 179–81 Williams, Fannie Barrier  11, 162, 166, 180 Williams, Laing  166 Williams, Sylvania  30 Wilson, Agnes  198 n.63 Wilson, Mabel  35 Wollstonecraft, Mary  51, 78, 191 n.2 womanism  6, 7, 21, 94 women, see individuals of interest; subject areas women and virtue, see virtue women as mothers, caretakers  6, 12, 13, 18–19, 24–5, 59–63, 67, 113–14, 128, 151, 154, 204 n.35 women philosophers, see philosophy, by women women’s career options  8, 13, 14–15, 18, 24–5, 59, 72, 77, 86–7, 97, 101, 107, 139, 144, 147, 168 Women’s Christian Temperance Union  98–9, 170, 179–80 women’s domain  11–12, 18–19, 23–5, 60–2, 67, 113–14, 126, 147–8 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom  154 Women’s International Peace Congress (San Francisco, 1915)  163 Women’s Peace Party  151, 154 women’s social/political issues  5, 12, 68, 97, 98–100, 113, 114, 135–8, 147, 149, 164, 180, 183, 184, 188

“women’s sphere”  60–1, 74, see also private life Woodhull, Victoria  185 Woodson, Carter G.  130, 166, 182 Woolley, Celia Parker  180–1 Worden, Harriet  185, 220 n.72 Workman desegregation case (Joseph Workman v. Board of Education of Detroit)  29 World Congress of Women (Chicago, 1874)  144 world court  154, 156, 158 World’s Fair (Columbian Exposition, 1893)  113, 211 n.3 Wright, Fanny  11, 185 Xalapa normal school (Mexico)  30, 103, 209 n.97, 209 n.98 Yale University  14 Yates, Josephine Silone  5, 10, 19, 24, 56, 59, 66, 166 life and career  35–8 poverty and education  58 racism  58–9 “self-activity”  40 women as caretakers  62–3 Yates, W.W.  36 Yen, Julia  31 Zapata, Dolores Correa  68, 103, 104–5, 110 Zapata, Elena  30–1 Zapata, Rosaura  30–1 Zavala, Gertrudis Tenorio  103–4 Zeller, Eduard  139, 145 Zit-kala-sa  50, see also Gertrude Bonnin Zola, Emile  183

245

246

247

248

249

250