History of American Women

Catharine Maria Sedgwick

2012-01-23T20:52:00.001-05:00

Writer and Novelist in Antebellum America

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was one of nineteenth-century America's most prolific women writers. She published six novels, two biographies, eight works for children, novellas, over 100 pieces of short prose and other works. Literary critics and historians have recognized her as a primary founder of a distinctly American literature, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Sedgwick's close friend, William Cullen Bryant.

Childhood
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ninth child of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, was born December 28, 1789 at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the house which her father had built four years before. While Catharine loved and respected her mother, Pamela Sedgwick suffered repeated periods of mental illness and does not seem to have been close to her daughter.

Catharine greatly admired her father, though he was often away for his political career, which culminated in his becoming Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. In his absence Catharine was surrounded by her many siblings. As a young woman, Sedgwick attended Payne's Finishing School in Boston.

Sedgwick was particularly attached to her four brothers, who encouraged her to write. Even when they had all married and become lawyers, her brothers remained the central figures in her emotional life. She passed part of every year in the family of one of her brothers, and was a favorite aunt to many children. Together they worked to sustain her often failing self-confidence, and assisted her with contracts and reviews.

As a child, Catharine Sedgwick was cared for by Elizabeth Freeman, a former slave often called Mum Bett. Sedgwick's father helped Freeman gain her freedom by arguing her case in county court in 1781. After winning her freedom, Freeman accepted the offer to work for the Sedgwicks for wages. Catharine is buried next to Mum Bett in Stockbridge.

Writing Career
Much in demand, from the 1820s to the 1850s Catharine Sedgwick made a good living writing short stories for a variety of periodicals. A writer of juvenile fiction, moral tales and domestic literature as well as numerous novels, Sedgwick was a well-respected literary figure in New England before the appearance of her novel Hope Leslie, now her most popular work.

In her writings, Catharine Sedgwick shows a consistent tolerance for members of minority groups. The hero of her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), was a Quaker. A long section of Redwood (1824) concerns a Shaker community, and although Sedgwick analyzes the psychological pressures keeping members within the group, the religion is never condemned. Similarly, Hope Leslie (1827) shows a sympathetic understanding of Native Americans and their religious beliefs, based partly on the author's research into Mohawk customs.

Unlike James Fenimore Cooper, whose Last of the Mohicans appeared the year before Hope Leslie, Sedgwick accepts marriage between an Indian man and a white woman: the heroine's sister, Faith Leslie, is carried into captivity as a child, marries an Indian, and refuses the opportunity to rejoin the Puritan community. Sedgwick may have been influenced here by the similar legend of her ancestor, Eunice Williams.

Sedgwick's fiction repeatedly emphasizes the political and personal need for liberty and independence. On two occasions Hope Leslie follows her own conscience and frees Indian women from unjust imprisonment. Both Hope and her Indian double Magawisca question political authority which does not include them: Hope, unable as a woman to work through the political system, defies it, and Magawisca denies a Puritan jury's jurisdiction over her people.

Sedgwick was immediately recognized as one of the writers creating an indigenous American literature. A New-England Tale was subtitled Sketches of New-England Character and Manners, and her novels, Hope Leslie, set among the Puritans, and The Linwoods, Or Sixty Years Since in America (1835), set during the Revolution, mingled historical event with fiction.

The central figures in Sedgwick's novels are women, often noted for their independence. In Redwood Aunt Debby, "a natural protector of the weak and oppressed," rescues a young girl held among the Shakers. Aunt Debby had decided to remain single after the Revolutionary War because she was "so imbued with the independent spirit of the times that she would not then consent to the surrender of any of her rights."

In her work, Sedgwick also promoted the ideal of Republican motherhood - an attitude toward women's roles in the emerging United States before, during and after the American Revolution (circa 1760 to 1800). It centered on the belief that the patriots' daughters should be raised to uphold the ideals of republicanism, which stresses liberty and inalienable rights.

Republican motherhood means that children should be raised to value patriotism and to sacrifice their own needs for the greater good of the country. Sons were encouraged to pursue roles in government, while daughters were more educated than they previously had been allowed in order to pass these values on to the next generation. Abigail Adams advocated women's education in many of her letters to her husband, President John Adams.

Sedgwick's Novels
Redwood (1824) is the story of Ellen Bruce, a young woman of mysterious parentage, who learns that her father is the southern slave owner Redwood, who has been kept from her because of the anti-Christian beliefs he picked up by studying Voltaire and David Hume. The novel ends with Redwood's religious conversion and Ellen's marriage to a Southern gentleman.

Hope Leslie (1827) is a historical novel that deals with such varied subjects as Puritan attitudes towards religion, women's role in the new American republic and the relationship between whites and Native Americans. It also revises traditional notions of submissive womanhood by arguing that women must recognize their domestic sphere as empowering and act as agents for the preservation and promotion of moral values. This book earned a large readership and established Sedgwick's reputation in both the United States and Great Britain.

Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830) is a novel of manners - a literary genre that deals with aspects of behavior, language, customs and values characteristic of a particular class of people in a specific historical context. Clarence follows heiress Gertrude Clarence as she negotiates the perils of the marriage market in New York City. In this novel, Sedgwick often satirizes the privileged aristocracy to which her family belonged.

The Linwoods; or, 'Sixty Years Since' in America (1835) is an historical romance concerning social life in New York City during the last two years of the American Revolution and the conflict between a Loyalist father and rebel son. It sheds light on American character and national identity in the early republic by exploring America's relationship with Britain and France.

Live and Let Live; or, Domestic Service Illustrated (1837) depicts the ideal workplaces for working-class women to develop domestic skills. Sedgwick's expression of relations between mistresses and housekeepers reflects a return to aristocratic class relations, but one that includes employer respect for the employee's humanity and political rights.

Sedgwick wrote work in American settings, and combined patriotism with protests against historic Puritan oppressiveness. She created spirited heroines who did not conform to the stereotypical conduct of women at the time. In her final novel, Married or Single (1857), she put forth the bold idea that women should not marry if it meant they would lose their self-respect (but she married off her heroine).

Throughout her life Sedgwick was ambivalent about her position as a single woman. She is said to have refused more offers of marriage than almost any other woman of her time. They were made by statesmen, artists and musicians. However, she felt that she should devote her life to writing.
She told a favorite niece that "so many I have loved have made shipwreck of happiness in marriage or have found it a dreary joyless condition." Even in her final novel, Married or Single? (1857), she reveals her conflict.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick remained single and died at the residence of her nephew William Minot, Jr. at West Roxbury, Massachusetts on July 31, 1867. Her funeral service was held at the Episcopal Church and her remains were followed to the grave by hundreds of loving friends and neighbors. She was buried in Stockbridge, where the burial markers of the Sedgwick clan are arranged in concentric circles known as the Sedgwick Pie.

Catharine Sedgwick was the most famous and successful American woman fiction writer in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although she was neglected by scholars and critics for many years, Sedgwick's work was rediscovered in the 1970s, and since then most attention has been focused on Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827).

SOURCES
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Wikipedia: Catharine Sedgwick
Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie - PDF File

Frances Wright

2012-01-12T21:06:00.000-05:00

Abolitionist, Writer and Social Reformer

Frances Wright (1795–1852) was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, feminist, abolitionist and social reformer who became a U.S. citizen in 1825. That year she founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee as a Utopian community to prepare slaves for emancipation, but it lasted only three years. Her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) brought her the most attention as a critique of the new nation.

Frances Wright, circa 1825

Childhood
Frances Wright was born September 6, 1795, one of three children born in Dundee, Scotland to Camilla Campbell and James Wright, a wealthy linen manufacturer and political radical. Both of her parents died young, and Fanny (as she was called as a child) was orphaned at the age of three, but left with a substantial inheritance.

An aunt acted as guardian for both Frances and her sister Camilla. Wright was brought up in the homes of relatives, including James Milne, a member of the Scottish school of progressive philosophers. Milne, who encouraged Fanny to question conventional ideas, was to have a lasting influence on her development.

At age 16, Fanny returned to Scotland and spent her winters studying and writing, and her summers visiting the Scottish Highlands. She educated herself from a college library, and by the age of 18, she had written her first book.

In the United States
In 1818 Frances and Camilla Wright came to New York where Frances produced a play she had written named Altorf about the struggle for Swiss independence. After returning to England Wright wrote Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) and A Few Days in Athens (1822). In Views of Society Wright praised America's experiments in democracy, and hailed American life as progressive in contrast to the backwardness of the Old World.

In 1821, Wright went to France to meet Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette who had invited her there after reading some of her work. When Lafayette came to America in 1824, Wright and his sister Camilla traveled with him, but not as official members of his delegation. They were with Lafayette when he was entertained at the homes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Since she was not part of the official delegation, Wright was free to move about on her own and traveled the U.S. extensively. While traveling down the Mississippi, she was appalled by the practice of slavery. She wrote: "The sight of slavery is revolting everywhere. But to inhale the impure breath of its pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that imagination can conceive."

Later that year Wright visited New Harmony on the Wabash River in southwest Indiana where Robert Owen and his son Robert Dale Owen were trying to establish a Utopian society. Owen believed that communal living would enable people to live happier, more economical and more productive lives.

Nashoba Commune
As a result of this visit, Wright decided to establish a colony in which slaves could be emancipated. She believed that slaves would work harder for their freedom than they would for a master, and therefore expected the colony to be self-supporting and to provide funds for the purchase and training of additional slaves.

Wright submitted to Lafayette a plan for buying slaves, without loss to their owners, followed by life in a colony where they would be educated and prepared for freedom. This plan was discussed with former Presidents Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe and encouraged by Lafayette. Lafayette recommended Frances Wright also visit Senator Andrew Jackson.

Jackson agreed to help Wright find suitable land and slaves and suggested that she acquire land in the new Chickasaw purchase, approximately fifteen miles east of Memphis, Tennessee, which Jackson and his partners had founded six years earlier. It was decided that this area would be the best place for emancipation because public feeling there was more favorable to abolition than elsewhere in the South.

Wright arrived in Memphis in late October 1825, and inspected land along the Wolf River near the site of present-day Germantown. She then went to Nashville and bought eleven slaves including five men (Willis, Jacob, Gradison, Redick and Henry), three women (Nelly, Peggy and Kitty) and three of their children.

On her return to Memphis Wright bought 1,940 acres of land on the Wolf River, thirteen miles from Memphis. She described it as "2000 acres of good and pleasant woodland, traversed by a good and lovely stream (Wolf River), communicating 13 miles below with the Mississippi at the old Indian trading post of Chickasaw Bluffs."

Frances Wright was only 30, she was rich and was applauded in Europe as well as the United States. Many approved her ideas because she offered a way to prepare slaves to be self-supporting citizens, while saving the South from the shock of the sudden loss of millions of dollars of investment in slaves.

In later 1825 Wright established her experimental settlement and named it Nashoba, the Chickasaw word for the Wolf River. While her focus was on communal living for soon-to-be emancipated slaves, she announced that Nashoba welcomed anyone who was willing to work for the common good. She envisioned a self-sustaining multi-racial community composed of slaves, free blacks and whites.

Three men played important roles in the experiment: Richeson Whitby, a shy Quaker from Robert Owen's New Harmony community; a Scotsman by the name of James Richardson, who lived in Memphis and had strong convictions concerning moral freedom; and George Flowers, an emancipationist with experience in Utopian community living.

Though she was tall and walked with a manly stride, Wright was unaccustomed to physical labor. She worked beside the slaves clearing trees, burning the underbrush, building cabins and planting an orchard. These tasks put calluses on her hands, weathered her complexion, exhausted her strength long before sundown, and exposed her to the fevers of the land in the river bottom.

Frances Wright was inexperienced in the necessities of life in the wooded frontier, and found it difficult getting labor from illiterate workers, squelching quarrels among the field hands and distinguishing illness from laziness.

In December 1826 Wright deeded the property to a group of trustees under a deed of trust. The trustees were General Lafayette, William McClure, Robert Owen, Robert Dale Owen, C.D. Colden, Richeson Whitby, Robert Jennings, George Flowers, her sister Camilla Wright and James Richardson.

The physical work eventually broke Frances Wright's health. She became seriously ill with malaria and was encouraged to seek the milder climate of Ohio in May 1827. Her sister Camilla and Richeson Whitby were left in charge, with the help of James Richardson.

While Frances was away, Camilla and Whitby fell in love and married, and passed the sterner tasks of leadership on to James Richardson who took control of Nashoba's policies. Critics believe that with Richardson at the helm, the Nashoba Experiment drifted from its original course of emancipation into a dangerous pool of radical ideas on communal living and moral unconventionalities.

Frances Wright went to Europe to improve her health and there recruited Frances Trollope, an English travel writer. The two women returned through the port of New Orleans and up the river to Memphis, arriving at Nashoba in January 1828. By that time, the community had collapsed financially.

Trollope was shocked by manners in Memphis, dismayed by the desolation at Neshoba and appalled by the primitive room in which she and Wright lived. Trollope disdained the poor diet of pork and rice, without any other meat or vegetable, and no milk, butter or cheese; rain water was the only liquid. She remained a few days and then went on to Cincinnati.

The plantation seem doomed to failure. Whitby's health failed and he moved with Camilla to Ohio. Frances Wright, unable to remain at Nashoba herself, was forced to admit defeat after an attempt to operate the place with a hired overseer proved disastrous. Fighting gossip, criticism and poor health, Wright was forced to abandon Nashoba after spending her entire personal fortune on the project.

Her plan had been to have five years of preparation prior to emancipating the slaves she had purchased, then to establish a colony of Nashoba-trained men and women in Africa. The reality was that five years after she came to Memphis, she put 30 former slaves and 18 of their children on a flatboat for New Orleans.

Wright then chartered a vessel named the John Quincy Adams, and sailed to the black republic of Haiti in January 1830 with the Nashoba slaves, who were placed under the Haitian President's supervision on one of his estates and supplied with tools and provisions. If they became productive citizens, the former slaves were to be given land grants.

Political Activities
Frances Wright then moved to New York where she worked with Robert Dale Owen to publish the Free Enquirer. In the journal Wright called for improvements in the status of women, including equal education, universal suffrage, legal rights for married women, liberal divorce laws and birth control.

She then focused on education reform, advocating a system of free state boarding schools in which children would be educated without religious doctrine but receive training in traditional subjects as well as industrial skills. Her ideal of universal education gave a voice to those women who wanted more education for themselves as well as their children.

From her desire to see these educational proposals enacted, Frances Wright moved in the political sphere and became a central figure in the workingmen's movement, which consisted of activism by small farmers, artisans and workers in early factories concerning the gulf between the classes and the capitalistic system itself.

Women were particularly affected as they became more confined to home duties as industry shifted away from the home into the city. Wright and Owen also became involved in the radical Workingmen's Party while living in New York. Those opposing the movement referred to it as the Fanny Wright Party.

Dubbed "The Great Red Harlot" for her personal life, which included several illicit romances, Wright also developed her own dress code for women. This included bodices, ankle-length pantaloons and a dress cut to above the knee. This style was later promoted by feminists such as Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 1831 Wright married a French physician, Guillayme D'Arusmont, and moved to France and spent time out of the public eye. They had one child: Frances Sylva D'Arusmont in 1832.

When she returned to the States she resumed a political platform with a historical perspective narrating the ills of contemporary society. Wright's ideology, the workingmen's movement and the women's movement converged in the Popular Health Movement of the 1830s, and sought to give women a larger role in health and medicine.

In 1836 she published her last book, Course of Popular Lectures, in which she once again advocates the rights of women:

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike, assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race.

Wright's marriage was not a success. Her husband, D'Arusmont gained control of her entire financial resources, including her earnings from lectures and the royalties from her books. After a lifetime of struggling for high ideals, she spent the last years of her life trying to settle her financial affairs and a complicated divorce.

After the midterm campaign of 1838, Frances Wright began to suffer from a variety of health problems.

Years later, she was still embroiled in legal struggles with D'Arusmont when she broke her hip in a fall on an icy staircase in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Frances Wright died from complications resulting from that fall on December 13, 1852. She was 57 years old.

So great was Frances Wright's national recognition as a public figure, through her political activities, William Cullen Bryant wrote an ode to her while he was editor of the Evening Post. She had expressed through her projects in America what French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said, "that the progress of civilization depends on the progress of women."

As requested, Wright's tombstone in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery was inscribed with the words:

I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.

The heir to Wright's property in Ohio and Tennessee was her daughter Frances Sylva D'Arusmont.

Ernestine Rose Speech at the National Woman's Rights Convention in 1858:

Frances Wright was the first woman in this country who spoke on the equality of the sexes. She had indeed a hard task before her. The elements were entirely unprepared. She had to break up the time-hardened soil of conservatism, and her reward was sure - the same reward that is always bestowed upon those who are in the vanguard of any great movement. She was subjected to public odium, slander and persecution. But these were not the only things she received. Oh, she had her reward - that reward of which no enemies could deprive her, which no slanders could make less precious - the eternal reward of knowing that she had done her duty.

SOURCES
Fanny Wright
The Germantown Museum
Wikipedia: Frances Wright
Frances Wright, Woman's Advocate

Sarah Pierce

2012-01-05T20:26:00.000-05:00

Founder of the Litchfield Female Academy

Sarah Pierce was the founder of one the earliest schools for girls, the Litchfield Female Academy in her home in Litchfield, Connecticut. This was one of a small group of early schools that played a critical role in shaping educational and economic opportunities for women in the United States. Through her innovative curriculum, Pierce transformed the lives of the more than 3,000 women who attended the school.

Childhood
Sarah Pierce was born June 26, 1767, the fifth child and fourth daughter of Litchfield farmer and potter John Pierce and Mary Paterson Pierce. Sarah's mother died in 1770 and two years later her father remarried and had three more children.

During the Revolutionary War, Sarah's brother John Pierce had a distinguished record, rising to become the Assistant Paymaster of the Continental Army, and personal friend of General George Washington. Following the close of the war, he was named Commissioner of the Army, responsible for settling the army's debts.

Sarah's father died in 1783, leaving her brother John Pierce responsible for his stepmother and seven younger siblings. Pierce sent Sarah and her sister Mary to New York City to be trained as teachers so they could help support their stepmother and younger half-siblings.

Litchfield Female Academy
Returning to Litchfield in 1792, Sarah Pierce established a school in her home on North Street, which became known as the Litchfield Female Academy, one of the most important institutions of female education in the United States. Some of the school's most famous students and proteges were Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To attract students to her school, Pierce seized upon the post-revolutionary rhetoric of Republican Motherhood, which stressed the responsibility of women to provide the early intellectual and moral training of their children. This was believed to be crucial for the survival of the new nation.

Pierce also believed in the intellectual equality of the sexes, and that increased educational opportunities for women would not jeopardize the status quo of separate spheres of activity for men and women. Pierce also upheld the idea that women's work as mothers and in charitable and reform organizations was equally important as the work of men.

In 1792 the Litchfield Female Academy differed little from the large number of small female academies opening throughout the country, especially in the northeastern states. Pierce first offered a smattering of English, ancient and European history, geography, arithmetic and composition. But the academic curriculum developed and grew throughout the school's forty-one year history - from 1792-1833.

More than 80 percent of the students were from out of town and boarded with families in Litchfield, under Sarah Pierce's supervision. The young women were well integrated into the social, religious and cultural life of the town, known for its staunch Federalist politics and Congregational religious practice.

Prominent Litchfield residents, including the Reverend Lyman Beecher, Senator Uriah Tracy, Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, Julius Deming and Oliver Wolcott, had family, social, political and business networks which helped attract students to Litchfield. These well-known men also gave occasional lectures to the students.

The Reverend Beecher taught religion in exchange for free tuition for his children. The leading men of the town and their wives judged the compositions, maps, art and needlework shown at the school's annual exhibitions, adding to the school's fame.

Sarah Pierce ran the Litchfield Female Academy efficiently, making a substantial profit while providing a means of support for many members of her family. Her sister Mary handled the boarders and the school accounts, while her sister Susan's husband, James Brace, also taught in the school.

Pierce continuously improved and expanded her academic curriculum, offering many subjects rarely available to women, like logic, chemistry and botany. She also created her own history text, Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors, For the Use of Schools, 4 volumes. At the same time, she knew that teaching the ornamental subjects - dancing, music, foreign languages and art - was critical to the success of her school.

She experimented with innovative ways to combine the academic and ornamental subjects. Students drew and painted maps and made charts of historical events to reinforce geography and history lessons. They also illustrated poetry, literature, and mythological and Biblical readings with elaborate embroideries. Botany and natural history lessons were often illustrated with watercolor paintings.

The greatest influence Sarah Pierce had on the history of education was through the many young women she trained as teachers. More than 20 students became assistant teachers at the Academy and 58 students opened their own schools or taught in other academies, which paid far more than teaching in a common school.

She sent her nephew, John Pierce Brace, to Williams College to receive training in teaching the "higher branches" of mathematics and science. He joined the school as her assistant in 1814. Under Brace the school offered courses in Latin, Moral Philosophy, Rhetoric and Natural Philosophy, and other subjects whose suitability for women was debated well into the nineteenth century.

Pierce created an educational philosophy in which all learning – academic, moral, religious and social – was part of the total development of the young women in her school. Pierce gave frequent lectures on proper conduct in all aspects of life. Diplomas were awarded to girls completing a full course of study.

These young women were aware that they were receiving the highest level of education then available to women in the United States. The growth of the curriculum of the school also provided an important transition to the later, better-known schools for women established by Catharine Beecher and Emma Willard, both of which had their roots in the Litchfield Female Academy.

Sarah Pierce encouraged her students to become involved in benevolent and charitable societies. The Litchfield Female Academy students organized to support local missionary, Bible and tract societies and raised money for the training of ministers. Most of the students spread Pierce's ideals of Christianity, morality, education and character to their family and friends.

The presence of Tapping Reeve's Litchfield Law School also helped the academy to achieve a national reputation. Distant families often sent their daughters to Pierce's Academy while their sons attended Reeve's Law School. The presence of the two schools ensured an active social life, seen as a part of the educational training of young women. More than 100 of Sarah Pierce's pupils married students from the Law School.

By 1798 the school became so successful that the leading men of the town took up a subscription of $385 to erect a building for Pierce's school on the north side of her home, but left full control of the school to Pierce. The building was described as being a large room with a swinging partition in the center so that the room could be expanded or divided as needed. There was a fireplace at each end and students sat at benches with no backs during lessons.

Later Years
In 1827, when Pierce was sixty years old, a board of trustees was formed in order to finance a new larger and more modern structure on the site of the previous building, in order to attract more students. Pierce's nephew John Pierce Brace became the director the same year, but she continued to teach, focusing on her favorite subject - history.

The effort to improve the school was not a success and John Pierce Brace left Litchfield to head Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary in 1832. The Board attempted to keep the school going, with former students as teachers, but to no avail. The building is no longer standing today but a marker on North Street denotes where the school was located. Sarah Pierce's house was torn down in 1896 to make way for another home.

Sarah Pierce never married; she died January 19, 1852, and was buried in the West Burying Ground.

The Litchfield Enquirer newspaper published an obituary on January 22, 1852:

We regret the necessity which compels us to announce the departure from this life of one who has perhaps been more extensively known for a period of sixty years than any other lady in New England. Miss Sarah Pierce died at her residence in this village on Monday morning, the 19th last, at the advanced age of 83 years.

The longevity of the Litchfield Female Academy, the size of the enrollments, the wide geographic distribution of the student body, the development of the curriculum and the training of teachers, all distinguish it from the numerous other female academies of the Early Republic. The young women were exposed to ideas and customs from all parts of the new nation, developing a more national perspective than most Americans of the period.

SOURCES
Wikipedia: Sarah Pierce
Litchfield Female Academy
A History of the Litchfield Female Academy