ABSTRACT
As my previous chapter illustrated, the most infl uential American girls’ schools of the 1810s, 20s, and 30s-located almost exclusively in New England-endeavored primarily to prepare their white, middle-class students for the duties of domestic life. Much to Elizabeth Stoddard’s dismay, educators’ concerns with students’ wifely and maternal “destiny” frequently superceded their concerns for students’ intellectual potential or individual self-fashioning, and dashed the hopes of many young females that education would lead them to freedom from domestic constraints. The republican concept of the family as a building block for the nation-a defi - nition which underwrote many arguments in favor of female educationdemanded that girls’ schools nurture, protect, and increase students’ sense of obligation to serve their consanguineal families as sisters and daughters, and their conjugal families, in later years, as wives and mothers.
