Janet Carey Eldred, University of Kentucky
Peter Mortensen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

If Louisa Tuthill takes an unusually harsh stance against feminists who promoted women's suffrage in the 1830s and 40s, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps demonstrates just how common that stance was among female educators of that time. Phelps was born in 1793, just as Judith Sargent Murray was beginning to publish in periodicals, and came of age at a moment when the neoclassical sentiments Murray espoused were falling out of favor. Living through the better part of the nineteenth century--she died at 91 in 1884--Phelps was affiliated with four major female institutes in her day, including the pathbreaking Troy Female Seminary, founded in 1821 by her sister, Emma Hart Willard.[1] Phelps began working at Troy as a teacher in 1823-24 after the death of her husband, Simeon Lincoln. The institution was already thriving with 138 pupils, seven teachers, and three assistant teachers--and, because of good relations with the nearby Rensselaer School, it was able to offer a substantial program of applied science courses (Bolzau 68). When Willard took leave for an extended trip to Europe, Phelps filled the gap she left, presiding over Troy during the 1831-32 academic year. Two years after her time at Troy, in 1833, Phelps, with the encouragement of Catharine Beecher, published her lectures under the title, Lectures to Young Ladies, and thereafter, under various titles. Phelps also built on the administrative experience she gained at Troy, serving as principal of schools for young women in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Rahway, New Jersey, before settling into a long-term position as head of the Patapsco Female Academy in Ellicott's Mill, Maryland, a school known widely in its day for providing an education on northern principles for young women of the South. In addition to her administrative accomplishments, Phelps authored several very successful introductory botany and chemistry texts, two oft-reprinted collections of lectures and commencement addresses, and three novels for young women.

These accomplishments notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to see Phelps as a prototypical early feminist, in the vein of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who studied under Phelps at Troy.[2] Indeed, as does Tuthill, Phelps saves some of her most heated language for proponents of women's rights as she distances her progressive aims from theirs:

Why would such a strong advocate of women's education, a proponent of female self-reliance, and a supporter of independent teachers, take such a stance? Presumably she felt such a rhetorical strategy necessary to separate their controversial project from her own controversial one--the establishment of "public" female academies, whose lands and facilities were built and maintained at public expense, whose teachers were qualified to instruct in academic areas as well as in Christian faith, whose tuition was affordable to "daughters of humble mechanics and farmers," and whose curriculum would satisfy "the wealthiest and most powerful" of citizens (96). Thus, even as she built and promoted models of public schooling and aligned herself with emerging professional venues such as the American Institute of Instruction, she did so immersing herself in the rhetoric and periodical culture of domestic economy.

As the sister of Emma Hart Willard, Phelps was well acquainted with resistance to proposals like hers. She knew intimately Willard's now-famous 1818 address to the New York State Legislature, with its restrained appeal for public support of young women's education. Willard's comments, printed in A Plan for Improving Female Education, would become central in nineteenth-century female education.[3] Even as the address employs female civic liberatory rhetoric to urge "the claims of the daughters of the republic," to insist that young women "share, in some small degree, with the sons, in those privileges for mental improvement," it promises that such schooling will not move women out of their appropriate sphere (38). Quoting from her sister's address, Phelps underscores the novelty of Willard's project and strives to link it to early national aims for a virtuous, long-lived republic, free from tyranny. History shows no other country, Willard claims, that has invested in women's education. But now, she continues, history "points to a nation, which, having thrown off the shackles of authority and precedent, shrinks not from schemes of improvement" (Willard qtd. in Lectures 38). Despite the encouragement of New York's governor, who supported the plan, the "novelty" of Willard's petition "caused considerable sensation." And while "the more enlightened members seemed, generally, in favor of considering females as the legitimate children of the state, and making some provision for their intellectual improvement," ultimately Willard could not persuade the legislature before which she modestly sat to deliver her address (39). Phelps laments the legislature's rejection of her sister's plan to endow a female seminary with state monies. Assessing the defeat, she recognizes the kind of opposition she herself would face: influential men who worried about the potential "evils which might result, from enlightening" women, who they believed occupied a "subordinate sphere" (39). Success, she must have felt, could result only if she could allay such concerns by creating a sort of public education that would prepare women to fulfill domestic and Christian duties. Phelps thus reflected the views of a new generation of women, women who employ a civic liberatory rhetoric, but curtail its revolutionary claims and highlight its promise of a single nation, stabilized by domesticity and an abiding faith in God.

The story of Willard's school, of course, does not end with Willard's defeat before the New York state legislature. Willard was able, through her "devoted zeal," to appeal to the "liberality of the city of Troy" such that the city did what the state "refused to do": advance "funds for the purchase of the extensive grounds . . . appropriated to the use of the Seminary, and for the erection of the spacious and commodious building" (44). The physical space of Troy and the preparation of its teachers would separate it from earlier home-bound institutions. At Troy, students could "retire to [their] own rooms for study, and at all suitable times, have access to teachers, who, devoted to their particular departments of learning have the opportunity of preparing themselves for their duties." And so Troy Seminary became Phelps's model, her touchstone. It featured "recitation rooms, where each particular branch of knowledge receives undivided attention. In chemistry, mineralogy, and botany, the objects of investigation" were readily before the students. "The very atmosphere" at Troy was, according to Phelps, "redolent of literature; not that which is exhaled from the muddy waters of abridgments and compendiums," such as the type Donald Fraser produced, "but from the copious and unadulterated fountains of knowledge" that a complete library provided (43-44). Troy Seminary thus supplied outside a private home environment those qualities so important to earlier Columbian educators, a place where "the youthful mind is in a measure to be formed, and . . . fortified against the seductions of the world" (48).

Finally, though, Troy remained Willard's school, not Phelps's. After her time there, Phelps would pass several years writing for various periodicals, revising her science texts and lectures, and trying to realize the best of what she had seen in her sister's school. Her immediate problem, as Willard's had been, was to convince some public funding source that educated women would not be a danger to the new Republic. And she did so, again, by discussing public education at once in the older civic liberatory rhetoric and in the newly emerging rhetoric of domestic economy. This enabled Phelps (as well as other female educators) to advance incendiary arguments about women's learning, while at the same time promising stability and tradition. Throughout her career, then, Phelps, like other women educators, dispelled misconceptions about educated women (often using as negative models women who challenged other gendered conventions, like voting) and argued the benefits--practical, moral, religious, societal--that would result from women's proper schooling:

Phelps not only devoted her own life to overturning this proposition, she instilled in her students a responsibility as educated women to show the world that women, properly schooled, were useful servants of society: "My dear pupils, may the whole tenor of your own lives be a constant refutation of the degrading assertion, that 'woman must be ignorant in order to be useful.' " The public, Phelps believed, was watching her former students; their high profiles as female seminary graduates demanded vigilance, demanded that they stay away from the "promiscuous" stage of public speaking: "On you the attention of many is fixed, and your future conduct, will be hereafter referred to as proving or disproving the problem, 'Is it for the good of society that women shall receive a liberal and enlarged course of education?' " Although Phelps would continue to assert the obligations of marriage and the duties of home, she would also insist that these duties would be enhanced by an enlarged course of education for young women. Even at mid-century, when women grew bolder in publicly arguing abolitionist and suffrage causes, Phelps would instill graduates of her "southern" female institute with the obligation to be advocates of union, rather than activists for women's rights or abolition or other causes that threatened the wholeness of the nation.

Female institutes were by no means new in 1830 when Phelps began standing in for her sister as principal at Troy Seminary. As we noted in the introduction, many women since the time of the American Revolution had opened female institutes in their homes. In her Troy lectures, Phelps articulated the problems with post-revolutionary models of education for women. It is against these models that she constructs and argues her own vision for state-supported institutions staffed by professional single women. The schools run by women of fashion, with "superficial accomplishments," against which earlier writers such as Murray and Foster railed, were still around, though the arguments against them were by this time so thoroughly advanced that Phelps has only to gesture to them (41). The efficacy of mothers instructing their own children or opening their homes to instruct others'--a staple image in Columbian educational prose--is the most formidable of the premises Phelps has to dismantle. She begins by acknowledging the foundation upon which Republican Motherhood was based: "that of all others, a mother was the most proper person to superintend the education of a young female." This seemingly natural claim, Phelps maintains, is a fiction put forth by novelists (perhaps such as Murray and Foster). In truth, Phelps counters, educational progress is hindered by maternal emotions that are too strong, and thus "not favorable to a steady and even course of education." Moreover, young girls must have experience in the world if they are to become valuable members of society, a condition that cannot be satisfied by schooling at home: "a young girl always kept at home, is awkward and constrained in her manners, often selfish and unamiable in her disposition, and ignorant of the customs of society" (33-34).

Still, Phelps acknowledges, these are the weaker of the arguments she will amass, and she is willing to take on the strongest argument for Republican Motherhood. She posits the most promising image of schooling at home: a mother well-schooled in the ways of the world, well-educated, virtuous, and even-tempered, that is, not given to excessive maternal displays. Even such a mother, Phelps argues, cannot with any degree of success, teach her daughters.

While instructing children is laudable, the task, if it is to be done well, is all-consuming, and thus detracts from other more important concerns, for instance, a wife's duties toward her husband, her family, and its "internal concerns," her duties to society (including social calls and charitable work). It is logically impossible, Phelps believes, for women to meet these social obligations and to instruct their daughters as well. The attempt will fail; all obligations will be only partially met. Advanced learning requires consistency, rigorous and sustained attention, and above all, a schedule. Inevitably, in a home, "interruptions break in upon the regularity of the prescribed systematic division of time, and the pupil feeling it very uncertain that her lesson will, if learned, be heard, relaxes her diligence." In this way, not only is learning curbed, its effects are reversed. Constant interruptions teach bad habits of inattentiveness that at some later point must be unlearned (34-35). Home instruction, Phelps contends, results in lapses of duty toward husband and neighborhood, and produces dangerously miseducated children.

Phelps's argument works cumulatively: she has yet to even add to the catalog of duties the central obligation of motherhood: "the claims that younger children may have upon the mother's care" (35). She makes her claims concrete with the sketch of a well-intentioned friend, "an energetic and judicious woman" who because of money concerns and suspicions of boarding schools, tries to educate her own daughter. The result is disastrous: not only does her sixteen-year-old daughter not possess the knowledge of a ten year old, she is also awkward and thoroughly entrenched in bad habits. The daughter now presents a hopeless case (35). And still Phelps is not done with her critique of home instruction. She proceeds to summarize the case she "doesn't" make: that many mothers are "inadequate to the task of instructing" because of their own "defective education" or poor health (37). What sounds simple and elegant in novels and poems, Phelps contends, is hardly so in practice: "We, see then, that however beautiful in theory it may be to educate girls at home, it is not easy in practice" (36).

This leads Phelps to what will become one of her major contributions to female education: her conspicuous advocacy of normal schools. Phelps herself recognizes her work as informing a professional identity for women, as defining for them appropriate work outside the home--as creating a respectable option for all women, whether reversals of fortune render such work necessary or whether their fortunate destiny is to remain single. As Phelps would later write in an address to her Patapsco students, if a woman enters "into the marriage state, she multiplies her chances of unhappiness" (Hours 137). At the very least, she counsels these students, a young woman will be happier if she "does not consider marriage as necessary to her happiness and respectability in life." For women who are not drawn into "domestic cares," there is another "high calling," "a noble profession fitted to bring forth the very best faculties of the soul" (Hours 115, 151). Single women make the best, most appropriate teachers: "an instructor has, or ought to have, her mind free from other cares than those connected with her profession." She should be interested in her students, but not excessively, not "maternally" so (36-37). Lest her readers doubt this, Phelps provides a vivid account of what married life can bring: "[p]ain and sickness;--and, what is more trying to the mind than personal suffering . . . the anguish of watching over the distresses of others; of witnessing death in its triumph over the objects nearest to our affections. . . . [S]ome of you will mourn over dying children, some will experience the sorrow and desolation of widowhood" (Lectures 16).[4] Not that single teachers are exempt from trials. She reminds young women that whether or not they opt to marry, their lives will be a sequence of trials which they should welcome as evidence of God's love for them ("whom He loveth He chasteneth" [Hours 115]). Still, teachers will experience a particular kind of chastening, less severe than those who marry, but more visible: "While so many of our sex live for their own enjoyment, or confine their efforts to the little domestic circle which bind their sympathies, we live for the public; to us are allotted trials and difficulties peculiar to our profession" (Hours 131). These trials, as Phelps details, have to do with losing students to death, or to circumstances in which the good work of schooling might be undone: unfit parenting, bad marriages, or fashionable society.

These single women, this league of teachers, needs only instruction of specific type to realize their potential. Of course, they need to have mastered certain advanced subject matter to qualify them to the teach (even at the lower levels), but they must also be aware of what good teaching demands, that is, they must know pedagogy. Phelps notes the pedagogical defect thus far in female education, "how miserably defective" most schools are "as respects the qualifications of teachers and their facilities for giving instruction" (41). The early national schools, like the district school she attended, were particularly deficient: a "single teacher often had the charge of forty or fifty pupils, assembled in one apartment, where writing, embroidery, rhetoric, philosophy, arithmetic, chemistry and spelling, were all mingled together, in a chaotic confusion" (43). Problems in setting were compounded by teachers who had little mastery of their subject:

Phelps believes times have changed, that much as improved since "those days of grammatical darkness and error." There are now better materials and methods: "books have been prepared on new principles of teaching, and the inductive methods has generally been adopted." Pedagogy has thus been developed;[5] it remains only to prepare women to teach and to construct ideal physical spaces for instruction to take place. Phelps was convinced--and dedicated herself to teaching others--that public schools for women were the logical and best alternative to the forms of home schooling that had been offered to the previous generation. Even with Phelps's directness, one part of her argument against Republican Motherhood remains only obliquely articulated, and that is that in her generation, immigration had increased by sizeable numbers the number of working class mothers unfit--by station, circumstances, or preparation--to teach.[6]

Phelps did not dwell for long on immigration's negative impact on schooling. She was apt to see democratic education as a glass half full. She frequently alludes to the idea that ordinary men in the United States, no matter their origins, could fashion themselves into great and influential figures through hard work and proper education.[7] This, for Phelps, was one of the great rewards of the American Revolution: "Unfortunate state of things [as in England], when one class, being led to feel that rank alone can give elevation, are thus deprived of an important stimulus to mental effort, and the other, depressed by the abjectness of their situation, can scarcely hope, by the greatest efforts to rise above the sphere in which they find themselves placed!" Although in 1833 such a rhetorical move might have been enlisted for abolitionist causes, Phelps brackets the thornier issue of slavery and focuses almost exclusively on white class issues and on the promise of upward mobility for children of humble origins: "It is the pride of this institution, that the daughters of the most humble mechanics and farmers, and of the wealthiest and most powerful of our citizens, here meet on terms of equality, except as virtue and talents make a distinction. Our country is probably the only one in the world which exhibits such a scene" (96). Moreover, she embraces the notion that the genius of the United States, its formula for success, rests in leaders who are chiefly self-made: "If we look to our state legislatures, our national congress, and the highest executive and judicial offices in the country, we do not find these place chiefly occupied by those who were born to wealth, or only taught the pride of aristocratic distinctions. Most of the great men of our country have made their own fortunes. . ." (28-29). Such words are meant to encourage learning in her students, no matter what their current station. "Take courage," she counsels, "and remember that to a certain degree, especially in our own country, every one is, in a degree, the 'artificer of his own fortune' " (28).

Phelps was not so idealistic as to believe that citizens of this new nation would be satisfied enough with these "terms" of equality that they would not aspire to elite status. She recognized that many would want to claim superior status, that some young women might want to claim the privilege of being "parlor boarders," set apart from the "masses" of other young women. Phelps was prepared with rhetoric appealing to both patriotism and status: "We know," in the United States, "of no hereditary claims to respect, which can set aside the superior claims of merit; and if the attempt is made to render any school in our country of an exclusive character, it must, from the very genius of our government, and the nature of our institutions, prove as abortive as it is ridiculous" (96). Pay for such education, Phelps facetiously warns, but do so at risk, for knowledge in this country "cannot, like houses and lands, be purchased by money" (94). A public education such as that they are receiving is the best, most logical for success. An exclusive education makes one unfit for life in a democracy:

Of course, while money cannot buy knowledge, it still leaves its mark, Phelps laments, on the quality--even the possibility--of education. Young women, she believes, should study an ancient as well as modern languages. Yet such a curriculum demands years of schooling, time that students from laboring families cannot afford, both because of lack of cash for tuition and because of the labor lost when a daughter attends school. More to the point, poverty unfits children for learning. Education requires, according to Phelps, a trained balance between body and mind. Physical habits begin in infancy and are as firmly embedded as mental ones (50-51). If exclusive education or maternal schooling can make one unfit for life in a democracy, so can poverty, which throws too much emphasis on the body and which moreover, from infancy, creates poor physical habits: "The children of persons in the lower classes of society usually live wholly for the body. Play and labor, eating and sleeping make up the history of their early days. Or if they go to school and learn to read and write, their intellectual exercises are of so low a nature, as to leave the balance greatly in favor of the body." Occasionally, Phelps notes, exceptional children are capable from breaking free of their wretched early training: "We sometimes see, even under such unfavorable circumstances, the working of intellect, as if struggling to escape from the rubbish under which it lies;--we see spirits endued with great power and force burst opposing barriers and urge an onward course, mounting upwards like the eagle, impatient to gaze upon the fountains of intellectual light." However, such intellectual flights are uncommon: it is "rare for the children of very poor and debased parents to make such an escape from the chains in which mind is held by matter."

This idea of a balance between mental and physical exertion was central to her plan of education. The ills of sedentary habits, she worries, could be magnified by fashions of the day (corsets too tight, slippers too light for severe weather, etc.): "As respects our own sex, both fashion, and increased attention to the mind, have been alike injurious in producing habits tending to physical derangement" (53). Indeed, events in Phelps's own life made her wary of promoting intellectual activities at the expense of the physical. In 1832 her stepdaughter Lucy observes, "Mother writes a great deal, so much that I am afraid that she will injure her health (qtd. in Bolzau 55). Lucy is right to worry: between 1831 and 1838, Phelps publishes at least five full-length works, with the result that "severe mental labor and close application, with consequent sedentary habits" (her words) did in fact seriously erode her health. Still, Phelps does not join the ranks of those who believe that women's schooling ruins their health. She insists, however, on "mental discipline," using one's mind to maintain "discipline over the body" and establish good physical habits (54). Toward this end, Phelps turns to her favorite subject--botany. During her stint at Troy she appeals successfully to the city and acquires "a considerable addition to the seminary grounds" to be used for cultivating flowers, which along with dancing (as a school exercise only, not to be done in "promiscuous" company), proper sitting and walking with a book on one's head, would keep Troy women fit and in correct posture. And should God or early bad habits produce physical deformity, all is not lost: "A crooked tree might indeed bear good fruit"; a "richness of mental culture" will compensate (60).

What Phelps promoted, then, was a program of intellectual stimulation combined with physical exercise and domestic labor. Young women of leisure, as well as those compelled to labor, would benefit from this balance. Phelps understands, however, that parents--especially those who must pay tuition--would be suspicious both of this "democratic mix" and of the inclusion of domestic labor. They would, after all, expect some exclusivity for their money. And Phelps is willing to concede that, under adverse conditions, a school without exclusive admissions requirements could be pulled down to the lowest common denominator--a moral, not economic one. "In a public school, where many young persons form a collective mass, there are dangers arising from their effects upon each other. 'As a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump,' so do pride, vanity, and disregard to moral and religious principles, spread from one and contaminate many." Still, these fears only take Phelps back to her starting point: the need for schooled professional teachers. Mental and spiritual discipline in the person of a well-trained teacher would work against this eventuality, as would a firm grounding in the necessity of "self-government" (44-46). Virtue, the foundation of democracy, could thus be assured.

Although certainly nowhere close to what we recognize as public education today, Phelps's idea of public education is decidedly liberal, opening opportunities for at least some part of the population, indeed insisting that this democratic mix (a pale one, to be sure) was an essential strength of the industrious new nation. What she articulates from her experiences at Troy Seminary, she presses on her Patapsco audience, many who are southern young women whom she viewed as having been pampered by domestics. In her collection of addresses at Patapsco, she uses the example of a northern "democratic mix" of schooling to inspire a similar arrangement in the South:

Interestingly, Phelps comments on differences between northern and southern labor without any reference to slavery. Insofar as "domestic" help renders women physically inactive, it is bad practice, producing at worst lethargy, at best, an imbalance between body and mind. Phelps thus addresses one the most vexed issue of her day on domestic and pedagogical levels, and in this way steers clear of the heightened moral rhetorics of both pro-slavery and abolitionist factions. This highlighting of education for daughters of laborers and bracketing of education for African-Americans (free or slave)--even very early in her career at Troy in the North--forecasts a political stance that intensified as she aged and relocated further South.

* * *

[From here we move into a discussion of Phelps's curricula at Troy and Patapsco, followed by a discussion of Ida Norman, her fictionalized portrayal of life in a female academy.]

Notes

[1] Troy traces its roots back to the innovative boarding school Willard conducted in Middlebury, Vermont, as school which benefited from its proximity to Middlebury College. It was at Emma's Middlebury boarding school that young Almira began a course of advanced instruction under her sister's guidance.

[2] Phelps's work has been examined as part of feminist historians' efforts to reclaim the work of antebellum women writers. Phelps's anti-suffrage stance, combined with her ambitious programs for higher education for women, have led scholars to debate whether she can accurately be claimed as an early feminist. Thomas Woody's influential 1929 history claims female seminaries as important precursors of women's rights, and thus places Phelps in the earliest phase of this movement. In 1974, Keith Melder challenged this claim in an article, "Mask of Oppression: The Female Seminary Movement in the United States." Five years later, Anne Firor Scott reaffirms Woody's earlier claim, particularly in reference to Troy, noting that "[i]t is only in retrospect that [Troy Female Seminary] can be seen to have been an important source of feminism and the incubator of a new style of female personality" (3), one with an "intellectual component" (12). Most recently, in 1995, Robert Hendrick, re-engages this debate, offering again the counter argument to Woody and Scott: although "Phelps was . . . one of the most important nineteenth-century American female intellectuals," she "used her success as a science popularizer and educational reformer to defend conservative ideological positions, especially with regard to women" (294). In fact, Scott and Hendrick are not so far apart. Scott recognizes that Phelps held and advanced "feminist" values simultaneously with "traditional" ones. Hendrick notes that Phelps defended the "dependent status of women even as she sought their educational advancement" (294). In short, Phelps, in the volumes of prose she leaves us, shows that she was both a tireless champion of higher education for women and a tireless critic of women's suffrage and public speaking.

[3] Willard's address was reprinted in a second edition in 1819 and later as a pamphlet by the Emma Willard Society, at the expense of one of its members, and apparently distributed to graduates of Troy Seminary. Called the "Magna Carta of the higher education of women in America," it remains a central text in the history of U.S. higher education. Today Emma Willard's seminary survives as a preparatory school for young women, with a website that evidences a keen awareness of the institution's legacy (http://www.emma.troy.ny.us/).

[4] This is not to mention the possibility of mental cruelty in marriage: "Too often those who are conscious of rectitude in the weightier matters of the law, omit within the sanctuary of the domestic circle, what they regard as lesser duties. . . . How little do we know of the sorrows and cares which oppress many who seem placed in enviable circumstances! We heard not the unkind word, the taunting sarcasm, we saw not the cold or scornful glance, which have inflicted deep wounds in that heart, supposed by us to be happy in the midst of prosperity" (Hours 162-63).

[5] See Cremin; Salvatori.

[6] See, for example, Erickson; Ignatiev.

[7] For various takes on the rise of education in the new nation, see Cremin; Kaestle; Katz; and Spring.

Works Cited

Bolzau, Emma Lydia. Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps: Her Life and Work. Diss. U of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1936.

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education, the National Experience, 1783-1876. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

Erickson, Charlotte. Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1972.

Hendrick, Robert. "Ever-widening Circle or Mask of Oppression?: Almira Phelps's Role in Nineteenth-century American Female Education." History of Education 24.4 (1995): 293-304.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Katz, Michael B. Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Melder, Keith. "Mask of Oppression: The Female Seminary Movement in the United States." [incomplete reference].

Phelps, Almira Hart Lincoln. Hours with My Pupils; or, Educational Addresses, Etc. New York: Scribner, 1859.

---. Ida Norman; or, Trials and Their Uses. Baltimore: Cushing, 1848.

---. Lectures to Young Ladies. Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1833.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi. Pedagogy: Disturbing History, 1819-1929. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996.

Scott, Anne Firor. "Almira Lincoln Phelps: The Self-Made Woman in the Nineteenth Century." Maryland Historical Magazine 75.3 (1980): 203-216.

---. The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary 1822-1872. History of Education Quarterly 19 (1979): 3-25.

Spring, Joel H. The American School, 1642-1993. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Willard, Emma. An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New-York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. 2nd ed. Middlebury: Copeland, 1819.

Woody, Thomas. A History of Women's Education in the United States. Vol. 1 of 2 vols. New York: Science P, 1929.

BACK TO TOP