ABSTRACT
On July 8, 1858, Dr. Christopher Cox delivered his poem, “Female Education,” before an audience of adolescent schoolgirls, their parents and siblings, teachers, neighbors, and school administrators, at the Annual Commencement of the Frederick Female Seminary in Frederick, Maryland. Over one thousand lines long, the poem was prepared, writes the medical doctor, “amid engrossing professional cares and duties, with no view to publication,” but merely to “aid the excellent Institution of learning for which it was especially designed” (3). Like the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of occasional poems and essays written on this subject for girls’ school commencements across the country and throughout the nineteenth century, Cox’s poem praises the efforts of the particular school for which it was written and celebrates the broader aims of adolescent female education while simultaneously lamenting the many ways in which the process of American girls’ schooling frequently goes awry. The doctor explains, for example, that the Frederick Female Seminary deserves special commendation because it provides a “sacred bower” wherein “Instructor, Parent, [and] Friend” collaborate during “childhood’s hour” to prepare the students for the mental, emotional, and physical challenges of adult female life, and especially for their future roles as spouses, parents, and educators of the very young (41). After reminding the Frederick graduates that their “mission” as American wives, mothers, and teachers, will be “to guide, to soothe, to cheer, to bless,/ To make man’s home a scene of happiness; By solid learning, sentiment refi ned,/ To mould and educate a nation’s mind,” Cox paints a picture of countless other American schoolgirls who, because they were denied adequate, practical preparation during their formative years, are not well-educated enough to perform the crucial female tasks of marrying, raising children, and teaching:
Thus, while the Frederick graduates are armed with a “youth and beauty, innocence and grace” that Cox fi nds “bewitching,” and are ready “to meet with courageous breast” the “toil and sorrow,” “pain and strife” that mark “the coming life” of adult American womanhood, other girls who have been trained only for ornamental and frivolous adulthood have no valuable “lessons conn’d/ to fi ll the dreary vacancy beyond” (7, 41, 37). In his contrasting representations of these two groups of adolescent schoolgirls, Cox seeks to aid the Frederick seminary by publicly acknowledging the ways in which the school has avoided the pitfalls of (stereotypical) defi cient European-styled education, and instead enriched the lives of its students, the local community, and the nation as a whole. His attention to the useless and possibly damaging work done by more ornamental schools, on the other hand, was undoubtedly aimed at reinforcing the audience’s appreciation for the more rigorous and useful school they hosted in Frederick, to extend their fi nancial and ideological support, and to ensure future enrollment from among their younger daughters.
