In their design and allocation of space, then, Jefferson’s personal apartments are a celebration of Enlightenment reason and its application to daily life. But this “great advocate of light and air,” as Jefferson called himself, provided little of either for his family members on a floor with a series of small, poorly lit, nondescript rooms, none of which were even visible from the exterior. In its arrangement of space, light, and function, the very architectural design of Monticello daily taught implicit lessons about the insignificance of female intellectual life. In spite of this, Martha Jefferson Randolph launched an education program for her daughters that was years ahead of both northern and southern schools. In her cramped quarters and in spite of interminable interruptions—a visitor once commented that her children “seem never to leave her for an instant, but are always beside her or on her lap”—she inculcated a love of reading and study in her six daughters, training them in habits of thinking that distinguished them from most young Virginia girls.
So admirably did she accomplish this work, Jefferson turned to her when he received an inquiry in 1818 from a Virginia friend about the best plan for female education. Admitting that the topic “has never been a subject of systematic contemplation with me” (his own daughters’ education only “occasionally requiring” his attention, as we know), Jefferson then sketched out in broad strokes his recommendations: carefully selected novels only (since most, he thought, were inclined to result in “a bloated imagination and sickly judgment”); for the same reason, only select poetry to promote “style and taste”; and French, dancing, drawing, and music. It was an utterly conventional program of study, essentially unchanged in thirty years. Of lessons in household budgeting, Jefferson knew “I need say nothing,” since running a household was a given for American mothers.
The catalogue he appended to his letter, however, was compiled by Martha and one of her daughters (probably Ellen), not by him, and it shows a very different approach. Martha’s own education and formation at Panthemont are reflected in this more substantial program for female scholars, even for those of humbler rank than her children: French literature (to be read in French), all the luminaries of English literature, ancient history, modern histories of Europe, America, and Virginia, mathematics, geography, natural history, and science. Perhaps no works on the list prove the continuing influence of her French education more than the writings of Madame de Genlis; she recommended no fewer than four of her books! Genlis, whose Adele et Theodore (1782) had been translated and read across Europe and in America, believed in the transformational impact of education and in the rational capacity of women. Like the male Enlightenment figures of her generation, Genlis was convinced that proper education would prepare her students to take their places as useful, responsible, and respected members of society. The tutor of Louis-Philippe, the future king of France, Genlis was a firm believer in home education as much for the benefit of mothers as for their children. For Genlis, one scholar noticed, the role of teacher “gave the mother a strong sense of identity and made her life happier, more meaningful, and more fulfilled.” In short, Genlis’s work furnished nothing less than the blueprint for Martha Jefferson Randolph’s transition from Paris to her life in rural Virginia.
A woman of great intelligence and a master of several languages, Ellen Wayles Randolph lamented the futility of female education and the invisibility of female achievement in her day. Her lively letters, full of wit and astute observations—sometimes cutting, sometimes hilarious—reveal how much was lost by excluding women from universities and the professions.
In some respects Martha’s reading suggestions very much mirrored the Anglo-American culture to which she had returned: William Shakespeare’s plays, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Dryden’s Tragedies, Alexander Pope’s Works, and the British periodicals that had been models of style and wit since the colonial period, The Spectator, The Tatler, and The Guardian. Girls needed only a basic understanding of math and science, so Martha supplied only a single text for each subject: Nicolas Pike’s Arithmetic and the Reverend J. Joyce’s three-volume Scientific Dialogues, which was aimed at a juvenile audience. Her recommended geography and history books were all by English authors as well. For natural history, however, she turned to the famed French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s multivolume Histoire Naturelle, in spite of his claim that the New World produced smaller and fewer animals than the Old (an assertion that her father had refuted in his Notes on the State of Virginia in the 1780s).
But Martha’s immersion in French culture thirty years earlier is apparent also. French plays, novels, and histories, as well as French adaptations of classical literature, composed a significant portion of what she considered a well-rounded girl’s education. Martha assigned the works of Molière, Racine, and Corneille; the plays and novels of Madame de Genlis; Gil Blas; a French translation of the Spanish novel Don Quixote; and the moral tales of Jean-François Marmontel. Her students read modern French history: Voltaire’s Histoire Générale and his Louis XIV, Claude Millot’s Histoire de France, and the Duc de Sully’s Memoires.
Her emphasis on classical learning is particularly interesting, since that area was usually reserved only for boys. Martha recommended Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Millot’s Histoire Ancienne, both multivolume works, to give her students a foundation in the overarching contours of ancient history. From there, she introduced them to a plethora of primary sources from the ancient period, allowing them opportunities for more in-depth exploration. Titus Livius, her old nemesis from Panthemont, she had apparently decided was best appreciated in English. So, too, were Cicero’s Offices and Sallust, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Plutarch. For students unlikely to read the originals in Latin and Greek, she liked John Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid and Alexander Pope’s of The Iliad and The Odyssey. But she recommended that Seneca be read in a French translation by Abbé de La Grange.
Two other works in French were inspired by the classics but were a modern take upon them: Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyages du Jeune Anacharsis. Adapted from the Odyssey, Fénelon’s tale describes his hero, Telemachus, whose search for his father becomes a journey of self-discovery as well. Sent to Greece from Macedonia for his education, Barthélemy’s hero produces a travel account that was an engrossing way for a young student to learn the geography of the ancient world. Both works were enormously popular in France. From this reading, Martha knew, girls would learn about virtuous leaders devoted to the common good, about tyrants and seekers of liberty, and about the moral life. Her daughters loved it; from childhood, Ellen recalled, “my heart would swell and my eyes would fill over the characters and exploits of the heroes of Greece and Rome.”
Martha took her daughters’ curriculum even further, however: They also studied Latin. As a girl in Panthemont, Martha had complained frequently to her father about plowing her way through Titus Livius, but she had read him in an “ancient Italian,” not Latin. Although Jefferson had frequently remarked that the greatest gift his father had given him was a classical education—more so than “all the other luxuries his cares and affections have placed within my reach,” he believed—he had not considered bestowing such a gift on his daughters. So Martha had been trained in French and Italian instead. But her daughters would not be deprived of that conventionally male curricular component. How exactly she accomplished this remains a mystery. Perhaps she relied on Ellen’s elder brother, Jeff, to teach her as he himself was learning; or Ellen may have sat in on his lessons with their father. The least likely, yet still possible, alternative was that she struggled to teach them herself. Abigail Adams complained to her husband about the difficulty of instructing Nabby and John Quincy in Latin without knowing it herself, so we know that other determined women tried it.
Like the Abbess of Panthemont, who persisted in importuning her superiors for what she needed for her school, Martha Randolph could do the same thing with her father when she wanted s
omething, and one way or another she secured Latin for her daughters. Their training began early. Anne was translating Justin’s ancient history at age eleven. As the girls got older, however, they had to divide their time between their studies and their housewifery training, which is why they loved the weeks-long visits they were permitted to their grandfather’s retreat of Poplar Forest. Preferring their books over all else, including company, Martha’s daughters also found respite at Poplar Forest from the crowds of visitors and curiosity seekers who climbed the mountain for a sight of the retired president, and from the work of hospitality that fell to women. Uninterrupted, Ellen happily “poured over volumes of history which I should in vain have attempted to read at Monticello” or devoted seven to eight hours a day to her Latin. Like her grandfather, she appreciated the gift of this ancient language. Having mastered it well enough to read Virgil, Ellen swore, “I will never again tolerate a translation.” The difference between the original and Dryden’s translation she likened to that “between a glass of rich, old, high flavored wine, and the same wine thrown into a quart of duck-water.” But Jefferson could only take two of the girls at a time since there were only two bedrooms in the small house. Left behind at Monticello, Mary once vented her frustration about “the precious time I am wasting from my precious studies.” She daydreamed about having nothing to do for weeks but her Latin, but in the perennial conflict women have always had in their pursuit of the intellectual life, she had no idea how that “would be compatible with my house keeping duties.”
Martha’s curriculum for her daughters clearly differed from her own childhood in significant ways, but it was very like that which Jefferson had recommended for young men over the years. Both emphasized classical history, Latin, and French. In 1785, for example, Jefferson sent his nephew Peter Carr a detailed letter of a plan of education that, in contrast to that for his daughters, he had considered long and carefully, each component building on the one before, which he would lay out successively over time. Read ancient history, Jefferson advised the fifteen-year-old, in the original Latin. Two years later, he sent Peter a list that included all the classics Martha would later recommend for girls. And when his grandsons were old enough, Jefferson would ensure that the study of Latin figured prominently in their education. In his retirement, Jefferson invited Francis Eppes to Monticello, where he could have a total immersion experience of French “with aunt and cousins who speak it perfectly.”
Jefferson’s program of education for his nephews and grandsons was, of course, much fuller than that for girls. Boys added a variety of sciences—botany, chemistry, astronomy, anatomy, and agriculture—since he believed they, and not girls, looked forward to a life’s work that would “advance the arts and administer the health, subsistence, and comforts of human life.” For the same reasons, boys required deeper study in mathematics, history, geography, and politics. As Jefferson observed to Martha’s husband, science was excellent preparation for planters, but if the boys were not able to farm, then the other subjects would be useful if they had to, as he viewed it, “resort to professions.” But to his mind, women—who would neither contribute to what eighteenth-century Americans called “outdoor affairs” nor populate the professions—had no need of such advanced study. Recall how his letters to his young daughters had pestered them for progress reports on their drawing and music!
In fact, less than a year after their return, he may have already regretted Martha’s Parisian education, which had given her so much more than mere ornamentals. Offering to bring his nephew Jack Eppes to Philadelphia to further his studies, he warned Jack’s mother to “load him on his departure with charges not to give his heart to any object he will find there. I know no such useless bauble in a house as a girl of mere city education.” Nor apparently was he much involved in Martha’s daughters’ education, except to ask the occasional question on the books they had read. Martha’s husband would not have been the impetus for their daughters’ unusually high level of learning, either; Tom argued instead that “the elegant and agreeable occupations of Poetry and the fine arts, sure become the delicate sex more, than tedious & abstruse enquiries into the causes of phenomena.” If Ellen was, as their family friend Eliza Trist once observed, “perhaps one of the best Educated Girls in America, a perfect Mistress of the French Italian and Spanish languages,” it was certainly because of the aspirations of her cultivated mother, rather than of her father or grandfather.
Martha’s program for her daughters was remarkable for her time, even compared with female education in the North, which just about everyone admitted exceeded anything that could be found in the South. The 1820s was a crucial decade in which northern female seminaries began to teach such subjects as Latin, natural philosophy, and botany. In the fifteen-foot-square room Jefferson allocated for Martha’s use, her daughters were studying those subjects a full decade earlier. The practice of extracting from their texts, a fixture of both Martha’s education and later antebellum female academies, was central to Martha’s daughters’ learning as well. Carefully copying segments from their voluminous reading, students compiled a treasure trove of knowledge and recalled the wise words that had most resonated with them.
This work of transcription was both academic and deeply personal. So when all of Ellen’s treasured keepsakes were lost in transit from Monticello to her new home in Boston, her sister Mary mourned the losses not only of Ellen’s writing desk (handmade for her by John Hemings) and family letters but also of “your own notes & extracts the accumulation of which has been the employment of years.” These pursuits (and her meticulous material record of them) had taught Ellen to refer to herself as a “bluestocking,” that is, an elite female thinker. But such women were not usually sought out as wives. Ellen wrote that in her experience, north or south, a woman who “is believed to have received a useful education is really more welcome than a blue-stocking Unitarian democrat could possibly be.”
This was no small consideration for the Randolph daughters, whose father’s increasing indebtedness made it impossible for him to provide them with dowries large enough to attract the husbands they would need for their own financial stability. Tom’s obligations had continued to pile up as he obtained bank loans he could ill afford to repay to keep creditors at bay. His continued efforts, into the 1820s, to sell off the heavily mortgaged Varina property were fruitless; he would sell the occasional slave instead to buy time. Elected to the Virginia Assembly in 1819, he was voted by that body to the governor’s chair for three consecutive one-year terms. That salary brought some relief, but more to the point was the winter social scene in the state capital, to which the governor’s daughters repaired to meet marital prospects. Ellen was not impressed with what she found there. She worried that her “mind would sink to the level…of stupidity,” she encountered in “the folly and frivolity of the beings with whom I associate.” Gay party chatter was no match for what she called the “feast of reason” that she enjoyed at home.
Ellen’s observations cut to the central problem of female education in her lifetime. What purpose should it serve: practical or intellectual? In the years immediately following the Revolution, several prominent people had tried to formulate answers to that question, with mixed results. At the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, founded in 1787, girls took lessons not in ornamentals like French, drawing, and music but in bookkeeping, to become useful and economical wives. From Massachusetts in the 1790s, writer Judith Sargent Murray had urged that girls be educated to self-sufficiency, even as she also tried to argue that educated women would not threaten men’s role as family provider. Maine’s Eliza Southgate emerged from the best girls’ school in Boston “with a head full of something, tumbled in without order or connection,” as she put it, but at a loss as to what to do with any of it. Educators, parents, and most students agreed, however, that girls’ education should be put to the service of the family, not to their self-actualization and advancement.
This is key to understanding th
e limits of the various courses of study, even one as advanced as Ellen Randolph’s. Classical education became increasingly important in the curriculum of nineteenth-century American girls’ schools. But it served much different purposes for girls than for boys. “Ancient history was acceptable for women, but the classical languages (especially Greek) were not,” historian Caroline Winterer explained. “Admiring the heroism of Cicero or Scipio was acceptable, but tying the heroism to prescriptions for modern statecraft was not; reading about ancient orators was acceptable, while declaiming aloud less so.” As was true of French schoolgirls in the ancien régime who attempted a grasp of classical studies, American girls also had to do so while understanding the limits of what they could do with their learning. Their hearts might thrill to the stories of worthy heroes, but their own lives could never imitate them.
Martha Jefferson Randolph had attempted to widen considerably the boundaries of female learning with her gift of Latin, but her daughters—however brilliant their education—remained otherwise confined by their sex. These limitations were dictated in large part by the gender conventions of antebellum America, whether in Boston, as Ellen would find, or in Charlottesville, which funneled young women to the route of domesticity. But they were also shaped by writers on female education, including Madame de Genlis, whose works such as her Letters on Education Martha so admired and recommended. An ardent Catholic and supporter of the French crown, Genlis did not challenge the idea that women were best suited for motherhood in the home. In that, she agreed with Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had spelled out his ideas on female education in his novel Emile. Genlis parted company with Rousseau, however, with her argument that women’s intellectual capabilities were the equal of men’s. She insisted that women, too, were capable of rational thought and judgment. For Genlis, all reading—even the novels that critics feared would provoke wild flights of imagination and passion—was valuable in the project of self-improvement.
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