Overview

Susan Nye Hutchison was one of many teachers to venture south across the Mason-Dixon line in the Second Great Awakening. From 1815 to 1841, she kept journals about her career, family life, and encounters with slavery. Drawing on these journals and hundreds of other documents, Kim Tolley uses Hutchison's life to explore the significance of education in transforming American society in the early national period. Tolley examines the roles of ambitious, educated women like Hutchison who became teachers for economic, spiritual, and professional reasons. During this era, working women faced significant struggles when balancing career ambitions with social conventions about female domesticity. Hutchison's eventual position as head of a respected southern academy was as close to equity as any woman could achieve in any field. By recounting Hutchison's experiences - from praying with slaves and free blacks in the streets of Raleigh to establishing an independent school in Georgia to defying North Carolina law by teaching slaves to read - Tolley offers a rich microhistory of an antebellum teacher. Hutchison's story reveals broad social and cultural shifts and opens an important window onto the world of women's work in southern education.

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9781469624334

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Reviews

Has much to offer both lay readers and academics interested in nineteenth-century intellectual and social history. . . . A new and interesting perspective on teaching in the antebellum South.--<i>Journal of Southern History</i>

A worthwhile contribution to the scholarship of US education history as well as women's history. . . . Highly recommended.-- Choice

Author Information

Kim Tolley is professor of education at Notre Dame de Namur University, USA and author of The Science Education of American Girls.

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