Education Of The Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South

The American South before the Civil War was the site of an unprecedented social experiment in women's education. The South, which ostracized the strong-minded woman, offered women an education explicitly designed to equal that available to men, while... Read more

The American South before the Civil War was the site of an unprecedented social experiment in women's education. The South, which ostracized the strong-minded woman, offered women an education explicitly designed to equal that available to men, while maintaining and nurturing the gender conventions epitomized by the ideal of the Southern belle. This groundbreaking work provides us with an intimate picture of the entire social experience provided by antebellum women's colleges and seminaries in the South, analyzing the impact of these colleges upon the cultural construction of femininity among white Southern women, and their legacy for higher education. Christie Farnham here discusses the relationships between teacher and student, the nature of female friendship, the impact of slavery on faculty and students, and the role of the schools within the larger social community. Further, she investigates the contradictions inherent in appropriating a male-defined curriculum to educate females in this particular society, and explores how educators denied these incongruitie Less