The Concept of Usefulness Among Collegiate Women in the United States from 1837-1922

Abstract

Scholarship about women in the 19th century concludes that few women attained a college education, and prejudices against women speaking in public prevented them from participating in public life. Scholarship by Nan Johnson suggests that the few women who did have collegiate aspirations were instead encouraged to remain at home and receive a form of “parlor rhetoric” as an elite education. Research by Lindal Buchanan argues that the few women enrolling in collegiate programs were enrolled in domestic courses and were taught a feminine style of speaking. Nevertheless, biographers have documented intriguing outliers: women who pursued a college education and then went on to enter public life and do useful rhetorical work. This project challenges existing scholarship by exploring colleges’ efforts to enroll women into mainstream coursework, including the rhetoric courses that would allow women to become public activists for social issues. Introducing the term “rhetorical usefulness,” the dissertation examines the educations of two specific collegiate women who later advocated for public causes and one educational site that trained women for public life. As early as 1837, university administrators invited women to enroll in college by calling on them to be “useful,” exposing them to the same educational opportunities as men. “Rhetorical usefulness” is defined as rhetorical training that empowers women to speak on civic issues in public spaces. Using archival sources, the core chapters examine Matilda Joslyn Gage, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, and the Cherokee Female Seminary as representatives of rhetorical usefulness. Gage, Kellogg, and the Seminar have received very little scholarly attention, despite their impact. Their examples and evidence of colleges’ efforts to recruit women illustrate that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many colleges sought to train women in rigorous coursework that enabled women to have activist careers in public life.