Answer the questions below based on what you’ve learned in this lesson.
What were the differences in educational and employment opportunities for women in the early 1800s? What arguments did men give against equal educational opportunities for women?
How did Southerners defend slavery?
How did education, art, and literature change during the first half of the 1800s?
Compare your school to an 1800s school as it was described in this lesson. What is the most obvious difference? What is similar?
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Women were not allowed to enter the all-male trades, professions, and businesses. At first, most Americans believed that women should not have higher education or even be taught to read and write. Before 1830 no university or college would accept female students. The only schools for women beyond elementary schools offered courses on how to be good wives and mothers. Subjects such as science and mathematics were considered suitable only for boys. Women had few career choices. They could become elementary teachers, but they were paid lower wages than men. Breaking into fields such as medicine or ministry was very difficult. Men feared that education might make young women dissatisfied with their lives. They also believed that it was useless and dangerous for women to learn such subjects as mathematics. They felt that the stress of studying such subjects might cause delicate women to have nervous breakdowns. |
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| They claimed that slavery was essential to economic progress and prosperity in the South. They also argued that enslaved laborers were generally well treated and that African Americans preferred slavery to factory work in the North. One defense was that African Americans were better off under white care than their own care. | |
| Beginning in the 1820s, American artists and writers developed their own styles and began to explore American themes and ideas. The Hudson River School of painters chose local landscapes as subjects, and George Catlin painted Native American scenes. James Audubon painted native birds. At the same time, transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, explored the relationship between humans and nature. James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe explored American subjects and ideas. Believing that inferior education threatened the well-being of the United States, reformers worked to change American education. In the early 1800s, only New England provided free elementary education. Because of the efforts of reformers like Horace Mann, Massachusetts founded the first normal school for training teachers in 1839. Other states soon followed the Massachusetts lead. By the 1850s, all states had adopted the three basic principles of education: schools should be tax-supported and free, teachers should be trained, and children should be required to attend school. Higher education also changed as many new colleges and universities opened. Finally, special schools for those with disabilities were established. | |
