Boundaries, Bridges, and the History of Education: An Australian Response to Maxine Schwartz Seller

Abstract

In her published 1990 presidential address to the American History of Education Society, Maxine Schwartz Seller contends that much research on the history of education in the United States, including the history of women's education, the nation as though its boundaries were impenetrable walls. She poses the question: What happens to the history of education in the United States-women's education in this case when we see the United States not as a self-contained unit, but as part of an interconnecting, interacting North Atlantic, or Western hemisphere, or Pacific rim community of nations? I Seller's purpose is to open up lines of inquiry generally, but she focuses on the flowering of education for middle-class women at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a phenomenon that produced the private female academy or female school as its most visible icon. Seller considers Linda Kerber's Republican Motherhood explanation but finds it wanting because it treats the United States in isolation, while, in fact, similar kinds of educational provision for women were appearing throughout the Western nations at the same time.' She suggests instead several possible reasons for this consensus on the need to educate women: the spreading impact of the Enlightenment; the spread of Lockean psychology, which suggested the importance of early childhood development and therefore the importance of the mother as the first teacher of her children; structural changes in the economy that made educated wives more useful to upwardly mobile husbands; and a new conception of citizenship taking shape in the modernizing state, from the United States to Russia. To