studied drawing; women were also likely to have their choice of painting, fancy needlework, and a whole range of other “ornamentals.” Unlike the study in composition or history, which might progress over several years, classes in the arts were generally designed to last but a single term. And unlike courses in composition or history, which were required and included in the standard tuition, courses in the arts were optional and almost always required an additional fee. Contemporary scholars have paid scant attention to this training. Historians generally regard it as a frivolous distraction from bookish learning—from the real work of republican education. Women’s historians, especially, have condemned it for tainting serious learning with domesticity. Art historians have compared it to the formal studio training available to aspiring academic painters in Britain and on the continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and found it lacking. Yet the sheer numbers of young women and men who sought art instruction, and who paid extra for it, suggest that this training occupied a far more important place in the early republic than scholars have recognized.57
Female and coeducational academies were especially likely to offer some instruction in the fine arts. Indeed, it is far easier to list women’s schools that excluded the ornamentals, like the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, than to count the ones that included them. In his seminal study of American women’s education, Thomas Woody found that between 1742 and 1871, 162 female seminaries offered more than 130 courses in the visual arts. And this number probably underestimates the percentage of schools that offered such training during the early national period, for Woody’s calculations do not distinguish between the curricular offerings before and after the 1820s, when the “ornamentals” suffered increasing, and increasingly sharp, attacks.58 Figures on the number of men’s schools that offered art instruction are far harder to come by, in large part because a far smaller percentage of them offered these courses. Nevertheless, drawing lessons were hardly an unusual component of a young man’s education. In Philadelphia, the Clermont Seminary (later Carre and Sanderson’s Seminary) included drawing lessons in their program to inculcate “a taste and relish for decorum, and politeness.” So did the Round Hill School in Massachusetts, the New Haven Gymnasium in Connecticut, and Nazareth Hall in Pennsylvania. Drawing was common enough that in the “Desolate Academy,” a poem satirizing the vagaries of learning at men’s academies, Philip Freneau poked fun at drawing lessons along with math, history, Greek, and Latin.59
Even when academies excluded drawing from the formal curriculum, it was often available off-site from independent teachers. This was especially true in urban centers, where, in the words of Charles Willson Peale, foreign and nativeborn artists had by the 1790s “become so numerous that I cannot undertake to make any account of them.” Looking to supplement their incomes, these men (and a few women) established drawing academies whose hours were carefully coordinated with the schedules of surrounding seminaries. For example, James Cox, who operated a “Drawing and Painting Academy” in New York and Philadelphia, taught “ladies” from 2 until 4 and “gentlemen” from 4 until 6, beginning his classes at precisely the time that students would have been released from their other studies. In a gesture of respect for the social distinctions prized by his patrons, he offered a separate “Evening School” to attract “gentlemen” who worked during the day. Although it is impossible to know how many students, male or female, attended schools like Cox’s, the number of drawing masters who sought their patronage suggests that there must have been a steady demand for their services.60
If both sexes studied aesthetics and some form of fine arts, they did not study in quite the same way or toward quite the same ends. The most obvious differences derive from conventions governing the gender division of labor: A young woman would have been very likely to produce a piece of ornamental needlework, something ranging from an alphabetic sampler to a large, embroidered picture; a young man would never have plied a needle. While a young woman might have chosen classes in fancy needlework or drawing, she might also have chosen to learn calligraphy, painting, japanning, waxwork, or worsted work; a young man learned to draw. A young woman with the inclination and the financial resources might have opted to pursue some form of “the ornamentals” throughout her school years; a young man typically relinquished his drawing class in favor of more focused attention on the classics or branches of English and mathematics that might serve useful in commerce. But gender also shaped the kinds of art that young women and men produced as well as its meaning.
Figure 6. “Autumn,” illustration from James Thomson, The Seasons: With the Castle of Indolence (1804). Library Company of Philadelphia.
Figure 7. Needlework picture depicting Palemon and Lavinia, created by Sarah Ann Hanson while she attended the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Litiz, PA. Pictorial embroidery of silk, chenille, spangles, paint, and ink. Private collection; photograph courtesy of Old Salem Museum and Gardens.
Figure 8. Embroidered picture of Mount Vernon, ca. 1807, made by Caroline Stebbins when she was a student at Deerfield Academy. Her father paid $5 (the equivalent of a half year’s tuition) to have the embroidery framed. Silk on silk, 13¼ × 16⅞ in. Courtesy of Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA.
The pedagogical and thematic parallels between young women’s book learning and their “ornamental” studies are arresting. Both were structured by emulation, by the belief that in copying appropriate models, students might transcend mere mimicry and internalize the style and substance of their betters. Students’ commonplace books and journals might have included their own observations, poetry, and even drawings. But they were largely devoted to “improving” extracts transcribed from published sermons, essays, poetry, and conduct and letter-writing manuals.61 Their painted and embroidered pictures were based on popular prints, usually selected by their teachers and produced in a style specified by—and identified with—those same teachers.62 The arts, in fact, were believed to be especially useful for inculcating the habit of emulation in young women. Thus, when one young woman turned up her nose at the ornamentals offered by the Bethlehem Female Seminary, her guardian was dismayed. “Her unwillingness to undertake any of the ornamental branches, shews her totally devoid of that emulation, without which nothing can be acquired almost induces me to believe that she is not compos mentis,” he fumed. Never mind that the girl displayed “no taste for the arts”: the arts fostered the habits demanded by other branches of study. “I want her mind exercised by every possible means,” he continued, demanding that the girl be kept at “worsted work as long as you can control her” and that she begin drawing lessons immediately. This, he hoped, “may prove the inception to other undertakings, which may diminish if not destroy” the girl’s “indolence of mind.”63
It was not just the process of emulation that linked literary and ornamental work. It was also the sort of original that female students copied. The same themes and turns of phrase that young women recorded in commonplace books and schoolgirl essays to demonstrate their mastery of polite letters were embroidered on samplers. Inscriptions testifying to women’s religious faith and practice dominated both media. But samplers, like commonplace books, also testified to young women’s participation in the transatlantic community of letters that shored up the republic of taste. If quotations from Isaac Watts were especially popular, girls also selected verse from Pope, Goldsmith, and Cowper. With needle and pen, girls praised nature, whose “beauteous works” when “fitly drawn” “please the eye and the aspireing mind/To nobler scenes of pleasure more refined.” They yearned for immortal friendships that might “outlive … the stars survive … the tomb.” Anticipating death, young women anticipated the passing of time, youth, and beauty. In prose and embroidered inscription, they reminded themselves that only virtue and intellect withstood the test of time. As one young woman put it, “Rear’d by blest Education’s nurturing hand/Behold the maid arise her
