women and intellectual life in the early American South
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Kerrison, Catherine
- Publish Year
- 2005
- Shelfmark
- VS 54 2006
- Thesaurus
- literatuur, romans, geleerde vrouwen, slavernij, etniciteit, onderwijs, religie, 18e eeuw, Verenigde Staten
- Description
- Claiming the Pen offers an intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they daily inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South. Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice—both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels—formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics: in homes serving as impromptu classrooms, not colleges and universities: and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. .Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to 'take up the pen' and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.