Engendering Curriculum History by Hendry Petra;

Author:Hendry, Petra;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Enlightening America

It is a measure of the conservatism of the Revolution that women remained on the periphery of political community; it is possible to read the subsequent political history of women in American as the story of women’s efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution had failed to do.

(Linda Kerber, 1980)

I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history.

(Judith Sargent Murray, 1798)

While Judith Sargent Murray was optimistic about the impact of the Revolution on women, the American Revolution was not a revolution for women. The focus on individual rights central to the virtuous citizen whose primary relationship was with the state—the public realm—functioned to exclude women more than ever from having a voice in shaping American culture and society. Enlightenment notions of citizenship were exclusively male, drawing their political “vocabulary from Aristotle, who believed that the good life could be realized only in the context of the public sector, a strictly male arena” (Kerber, 1980: 7). “Women were thought to make their moral choices in the context of the household, a woman’s domain that Aristotle understood to be a non-public, lesser institution that served the polis” (p. 7). Politics (defined as public) was the affair of men.

Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Noah Webster heralded the notion that human society and conditions could be improved by extending education to all. Well, almost all. Like their European brothers, they advocated education for women as a means for preparation for motherhood and, in the case of slaves, education was strictly forbidden and severely punished (Beale, 1975). Drawing on the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, the “founding fathers” embraced Enlightenment notions that privileged reason and rationality as central to good citizenship. The construction of the citizen, whose primary relationship was with the state, not God, family, or community required a new type of education. Reason and rationality required the suppression of emotion, a binary way of thinking, and an inherent understanding of knowledge as separate from the self.

Jefferson did promote three years of education for White children of all classes at community expense. After the three years, the most advanced boys would be selected to attend grammar schools for another two years after which the “best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and instructed at public expense” to finish the college preparatory courses (Smith & Smith, 1994: 232). Half would then be selected to attend college at public expense. Thus, while the Enlightenment ideas of extending education to the masses took root in America, it did so while maintaining a gender dichotomy in which the private sphere was the domain of women and the public sphere the realm of men.

In essence, the American Revolution completed the colonization of women. The only way in which women could serve the republic was through educating virtuous male citizens on whom the health of the republic depended. Republican Motherhood, in which women were to be dedicated to the “nurture of publicspirited male citizens,” became the central political role that women took on.

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