Mary
Treat |
| After looking through a number
of primary documents from the early 19th century, we chose to examine a
set of letters to and from a young woman named Mary Treat. We discovered
that she was the niece of a well known female educator named Emma Willard,
and we hoped that these letters could provide us with an in depth look at
the foundations of women’s education in America. Before sorting through
the documents, we knew some general background information about Mary. We
knew she was born in 1809 and died in 1831. She never married and she taught
briefly at the Troy Female Seminary in upstate New York. We knew which subjects
were taught there, the age of the girls, and the general pattern of evolution
in female education – in other words, we knew what was in the history
books. The documents we sorted through offered a more personal view: the firsthand accounts of a young woman who was actually involved in the early stages of the women’s education movement. Mary Treat’s letters reveal a great deal about her personality and therefore, they shed light on the type of teacher she must have been. Because each school was an independent and isolated institution, both the class material and the teacher’s personality were simultaneously instilled in the minds of the students. The close relationships that female teachers developed with their female pupils can be described as a sort of sisterhood. The classroom became a hotbed for the exchanging of values between the strong, independent female teachers and their impressionable pupils. Mary Treat’s documents provide valuable insight into this relationship. They are a sort of time capsule that was planted in the midst of one of the greatest gender-based attitude shifts in American history. |