“Cruel and Wicked Prejudice:” Racial Exclusion and the Female Seminary Movement in the Antebellum North

Abstract

In antebellum America, hundreds of seminaries welcomed young, middle-class and elite white women. Only a handful of these seminaries opened their doors to African American women. While historians have examined the social forces that shaped women’s education, the dimensions of racial exclusion in the female seminary movement have been underexplored. This chapter weaves the activism of African American leaders and students into the rich historiography on women’s education. These activists and students decried racial exclusion in education in various speeches, letters, and diaries. From their writings, what emerges is a continuous meditation on racial prejudice as injurious, sinful, and cruel. These meditations take on deeper meaning within the context of the female seminary movement: in their denunciation of prejudice, African American activists questioned the function of the female seminary as well as the alleged piety and character of the students who attended and the parents who sent them there. Given its exclusionary practices, the female seminary, they argued, actually reared and reproduced unkind, unfeeling, inhumane, and ultimately anti-democratic white women. Many of these activists did not wish to stop the female seminary movement, but rather wished to open up educational opportunities for African American women and to foster new ways of thinking about learning, intellect, and humanity across the boundaries of race and gender.