Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South

by Catherine Kerrison

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South. Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice―both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels―formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.

Genres: History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2005

About the author

Catherine Kerrison is an associate professor of history at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in colonial and revolutionary America and women's and gender history. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, “Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South” (Cornell), won the Outstanding Book Prize from the History of Education Society in 2007. She has recently written “Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America” (Ballantine).

Reviews

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Book

I loved this book! I have learned so much from this study. I love learning from history and this story has taught me a side of history I did not know or stop to think of. This has broadened my horizon in respecting those women who came before me and carved pathways for me to follow. I will forever respect the blessing of being able to read and write that was handed down to me by brave women who took courageous steps to blaze a path for such small acts of education I took for granted before.

[Rachel Alpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kerrison offers helpful insights into the intellectual life of southern women of the 18th century, as she shows what these women were reading, how their reading materials informed their perpectives of themselves and the world, and how they reconstructed or rejected the patriarchal ideals of their readings in their own writings. At times this book is a bit too information-dense, and I often had a hard time seeing Kerrigan's purpose for including so many examples and case studies. Still, I came to see the women Kerrigan writes about as if they were characters in a story, and I'd love to learn more about each of them if I can. Her connections between gender hierarchy and the institution of slavery are also fascinating, and I'd love to find out what other scholars have to say about these ideas. If anything, I learned that the act of writing can be an act of bravery for any woman, whether in the 18th century or in the 21st.

[LSC-University Park SLRC]

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