ABSTRACT
The early Romantic pedagogical texts demonstrate Rowson's engagement with both practical and imaginative knowledge arenas available to children and especially to girls in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They offer a means of understanding how training in citizenship occurs, and they suggest ways that women writers such as Rowson use publication to provide themselves with 'respectable' and imaginatively engaged livelihoods and citizenships. Susanna Rowson's best-known novels examine the ways in which women can be seduced or manipulated into positions of powerlessness because of lack of knowledge or lack of useful skills. Rowson begins her 'Essay on Female Education' with a statement about usefulness and ornament that intersects with her argument that children would be better off as owners of rational ideas than they would be as proficient readers of texts they do not understand: 'It is much to be lamented, that in present mode of educating females, the useful is entirely neglected, for the more ornamental and superficial accomplishments'.
