“And why may not I go to college?” Alethea Stiles and Women’s Latin Learning in Early America

Abstract

Presented here for the first time are the letters of a young, little-known American woman, Alethea Stiles (1745-1784), to her learned cousin Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), the seventh president of Yale College. Brief and no doubt modest though these two English and one Latin letter may be, they provide an important point of entry into the women’s world of classical education in early America. Increasingly, American classical receptionists are trying to look beyond the “founding fathers” and consider what the classics meant in early America for men and women alike. We might do well, however, to reconsider one of the long-standing premises of reception research: that women interacted with the classical past largely outside of Latin and Greek texts and wrote little in the ancient languages. Leveraging both her knowledge of Roman history and the Latin language itself, Alethea advocated for admissions into Yale College over two centuries before the institution would welcome women. Though this attempt would not succeed, the presence of Alethea in the historical record demonstrates that even institutions that explicitly excluded precocious young women still include them in the archives.