Category Archives: education

Women’s Rights in Early America

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The short comment on the title is that women had none. Although I would expect that wives had some input in their married lives and the lives of their children, legally they had none.

Women could not vote. The only people who could were white men, and white men with property at that. Women could not inherit from their husbands unless specifically mentioned in a husband’s will. If he did not mention her, she became the responsibility of her son. If the relationship was poor, he could, and frequently did, turn her own to starve on the road.

Women owned nothing. Although a woman might bring a dowry to a marriage, property of such, as soon as the marriage took place, the property became her husband’s. He could spend it as he wished, including on other women. If he chose to gamble it away, she had no legal recourse. (This, by the way, is a common trope in Regency and romance fiction.) One of the sources I read described a case of divorce. When the woman wished to remarry, she had to do so in her petticoat. Even the clothing on her back belonged to her husband and he refused to give her any of it. (This is why the farm Lydia owns becomes Rees’s after their marriage.)

Even her children belonged to her husband. In a dispute, he might remove them and forbid her to see them again. He usually chose his children’s spouses and determined where and when they were apprenticed.

Domestic abuse was not a crime. Although it was expected a husband would not beat his wife to death, English common law gave him the right to beat her with a stick no bigger than his thumb.

This is not a world I would ever wish to return to and it is certainly unfortunate that some people seem to think this is still the way the world should work.

One of the wonderfully progressive facts about the Shakers is that they believed in equality between the sexes. Although their work was divided by gender, and followed along traditional gender roles, women bore a equal share in the governance of the community. Education as well was offered to both boys and girls, a rarity at that time.

Dame Schools

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In several of my books, Rees’s children attend dame schools. I mention them almost without a description. (Of course I mention the schooling received at the hands of the Shakers. Boys and girls were segregated: boys were taught by the men during the winter and girls by the women during the summer.)

Well, what are dame schools?

The New England Puritans believed that Satan would try to keep people from understanding the scriptures so it was decided that all children be taught to read. In fact, the first American schools arose in New England. The Boston Latin School was founded in 1635 and the Mather School in 1639 in Dorchester.In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made town schools compulsory and other New England colonies soon followed. These were for white boys only. Common schools were established in the 1700s but a tuition was charged.

If parents could not homeschool their children they went to dame schools. Considering how busy most women were I wondered how that worked out. With that said, however, there were enough educated women in the North who could function as teachers. Usually they were widows who taught in their own home. They were paid in money but also in kind – baked goods, produce, alcohol and the like. (I imagine the abilities of these untrained teachers varied widely – from essentially a day care to a real school. But I digress.)

In the beginning education focused on reading and ‘rithmetic but soon it was the four R’s; ‘riting and religion as well. Some of the dame schools offered girls embroidery, sewing and other such graces. Dame schools went up to eight grade and most girls went no farther. Boys, however, might move to a grammar school where they were taught advanced arithmetic, Latin and Greek by a male teacher.

There was also a huge divergence between the North and the South. Planters educated their children with tutors and son were frequently sent to England or Scotland for schooling. During the early part of the 1800s, it was against the law to teach slaves but schools for white children were opened in Georgia and South Carolina (1811). Segregated schools for children of all races began opening during Reconstruction and continued until 1954 when the Supreme Court declared state laws establishing segregated schools unconstitutional.

A final note: These schools went only to the eighth grade just like the dame schools. For many rural areas of the country eighth grade school was the norm until 1945.