I started my journey with a lot of eagerness and enthusiasm. I was very excited for this very opportunity to participate in this group project. It was a research project each group member was assigned a different subject to investigate and to find as much information as possible, each time our class met, we shared information and talked about what we had discovered.

My topic, was Nineteenth Century friendship books. I was very anxious because my topic seemed interesting and simple. My journey started off searching the net, a tool that was very alienated to me, but soon became my best friend. I spent hours upon end searching the net, but had no luck.

I desperately seeked out help from one of the group members. Lee, who, excitedly introduced me to Mr. Jeeves the question answerer, I spent days asking questions, rephrasing, adding and subtracting words, I was faced with the fact that Nineteenth Century friendship books are rare and hard to discover. With no luck, again I frantically seeked out help from Mr. Long, our women literature instructor.

As I continued my search, I found a book at Old Dominion University library: Kelly, Catherine E., In the New England fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century Ithaca: Cornell University Press 258 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-3076-3 Publication Date: August 1999.

As she studied the lives of Nineteenth-Century New England women, Catherine E. Kelly found them to be tied closely to the changes that were taking place in the society and culture of the region from the late eighteenth century through the antebellum period. Kelly, and assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve, began this study as a dissertation under the direction of Christopher Lasch, and the work shows its origins in its careful use of a large number of primary sources.

Kelly is concerned with the changes that came to New England with the "thoroughgoing social transformation as the household economy gave way to a market economy". Her special concern is the way in which women dealt with change and continuity in their lives, and to that end she explores diaries, letters, friendship books, commonplace books, schoolgirl essays, and imaginative writings by women. Using those works, Kelly illustrates the ways New England women participated in the creation of a middle class through domestic pursuits and public rituals. Kelly’s book contains the historiographical essay the reader expects from a work that grew out of a doctoral essay, and it illustrates the author’s dependence on, and occasional disagreement with, traditional studies in such fields as the development of the middle class, the domestic lives of American women, the theory of separate spheres, and the rise of capitalism in the rural economy. Even when dealing with those broad issues, Kelly’s work is concerned, above all, with the place of women in the period. The reader will find fascinating sections of the book dealing with domestic tasks and responsibilities, paid and unpaid work, education, courtship and marriage, the transformation of love, private and public sociability, and fashion and consumption.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of the book is the way in which Kelly uses the voices of ordinary women to illustrate the theoretical points she is making. How better to illustrate, for example, the process by which marriages were arranged than through the words of women visiting in other "worlds" than their own? If the use of women’s own words to support the book’s theses is its strong point, the weakest is the lack of a conclusion stating those theses clearly and forcefully. Granted, the book’s final chapter on the sentimentalized New England village is worthwhile, but it doesn’t provide that final summary of the book’s arguments that would have made for a more effective conclusion.

Continuing with my search, I found a book from the William & Mary Library: Farnham, Christie Anne. The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South.pp x, 257. New York: New York University Press, 1994. No price.

Christie Anne Farnham bases her book on the assumption that education is power, and she argues that, through their education, elite white women in the South were empowered personally because their society celebrated the "Southern belle as the symbolic expression of white supremacy and the quintessence of Southern culture". This argument is an interesting paradox in the sense that the image of the Southern belle does not, at first glance, appear to offer women empowerment. Farnham admits that the image could "Be distorted into an expression of vanity and false values" and represent merely a frivolous, flirtatious, rich woman. Yet she argues that taking on the role of the Southern belle gave the educated young woman some control over the courtship process, which is, in Farnham’s view, the source of the empowerment.

In developing her ideas, Farnham relies on a variety of primary sources that are meant to give the student’s point of view and fulfill the author’s concern with "situating the development of Southern women’s education within the context of antebellum society and analyzing its impact on the cultural construction of femininity , among antebellum Southern elite women.

To these ends, Farnham uses private correspondence, journals, school catalogues, programs of events ( examinations, musicals, other entertainment), scrapbooks, friendship books, and other published reminiscences of both students and faculty.

These sources allow for the creation of several student minibiographies and give the reader a more complete understanding of the educational experiences of the selected few. On the other hand, the reader never knows how extensively the sources cover the Southern student experience in female colleges before the Civil War, and, consequently, there is no way to assess the generalizability of Farnham'’ conclusions.

In her analysis, Farnham compares female higher education in the South with that of the North, and this is a major strength of the book. One of her central arguments in this comparative analysis , is that in the North the metaphor of separate spheres of development. For men and women was used to justify women’s higher education, which was not considered a movement for equal educational opportunity ,but rather an economic necessity for women who lacked financial means.

In contrast, in the South a woman’s college education was, in Farnham’s interpretation, a sign of the class status of her family and a mark of gentility. According to the author, the educated Southern lady or Southern belle was not a result of industrialization and urbanization; instead these educated women represented the romanticization of white domination in a slave society.

The first part of the book focuses on the academic life of Southern colleges and provides much detail on the founding and development of these institutions and the curriculum offered. This information is employed to demonstrate that female higher education was a reality in the antebellum South and that the colleges reflected the South’s conservative view of womanhood.

One idea is that the flexibility and breadth found in the curriculum not only provided the "vehicle by which female refinement was inculcated" but also became the "conveyance by which equity in education was commenced." The exhaustive detail on courses offered and the histories of a wide range of academies and female colleges, however, do not necessarily lead to this broad conclusion.

In addition, most of the source material in this first section does not appear to give us the student’s perspective. Is the existence of the female college in the South automatically an indication that progress was made in the area of equal opportunity between the sexes as Farnham suggest? After reading this part of the book, I am not sure.

In the second part of the book, the institutional life of female schools is explored. Here is where provocative and interesting questions are analyzed concerning the status of women faculty, the daily lives of students, the importance of affection and romantic friendships, and practices that reinforced the concept of the Southern belle.

In this section, Farmham develops her argument about the empowerment of elite Southern women, while recognizing that this "variant of the chivalric model" was in conflict with the women so that they would develop a seriousness of purpose both in their attention to their studies . Later, in their dedication to domestic life centered around service to the family. Farnham ends her study with a short epilogue that shows how the Civil War brought an end to the advances that had been made in the education of Southern women.

Los Gatan Peter Cifelli indulges his passion for America’s early poetry.

This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-times, January 8, 1997.

Early American Poetry: Voices of New England Youth., was published shortly before Christmas by Armadillo Press of Mountain View. It is a labor of love, indeed a nearly all-consuming passion, for its author, Los Gatan Peter Cifelli.

For 10 years now, Cifelli has collected, studied and researched the work of the youth of Colonial America and the early years of the Nineteenth Century. Those were the years when schoolgirls exchanged friendship poetry books and schoolgirl samplers were in full bloom, Cifelli says. He is fascinated with what he has discovered about the poetry of the youth of this period. His source materials

Cifelli, Peter. Los Gatos Weekly-Times, January 8, 1997. <…/

Farnham, Christie Anne. The Education of the Southern Belle, New York University Press., 1994

Kelly, Catherine E. Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteen Century. New England: Cornell University Press 1999

[Return to Nineteenth-Century Friendship Book Project Homepage]