Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write

Abstract

The essays in this volume address questions exploring the nature of education in the nineteenth century. Literacy has been called a double-edged sword because it can be used for both social control and social reform. During the nineteenth century it became a key element in the social transformation to Victorian culture with its cult of true womanhood advocating piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. But both black and white women could resist the intended uses of the literacy they were taught in order to achieve social reform. Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write interweaves thick feminist social history with theoretical perspectives from such diverse fields as linguistics and folklore, feminist literary theory, and African American and Native American studies. The volume constitutes a major addition to traditional social science studies of literacy.