Women’s Education, T. H. Gallaudet Address at the Hartford Female Seminary, 1827

Catharine E. Beecher Hartford Female Seminary Women's Education

Ephemera and pamphlets

Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins. An Address on Female Education at the Opening of the Edifice Erected for the Accommodation of the Hartford Female Seminary, 1827, presents an early nineteenth-century argument for expanding women’s education, delivered in connection with the institution founded by educator Catharine E. Beecher in 1823. Gallaudet, best known as a founder and principal of the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, addressed women’s intellectual development while acknowledging the political and professional restrictions imposed upon them. He writes: “Woman cannot plead at the bar, or preach in the pulpit, or thunder in the senate house. yet hers is no trifling eloquence. Its power, though unostentatious in display, is mighty in result.”

Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins. An Address on Female Education at the Opening of the Edifice Erected for the Accommodation of the Hartford Female Seminary. Hartford: H. and F. J. Huntington, 1827. 34 pages. 5 x 8.25 inches. The address was prepared for the opening of a new building for the Hartford Female Seminary, connecting Gallaudet’s discussion of women’s education to a specific institutional expansion. Beecher had founded the seminary four years earlier to provide young women with advanced educational opportunities at a time when access to comparable schooling remained sharply restricted by sex.

The address belongs to the antebellum expansion of female seminaries and academies that enlarged women’s access to formal education before women were broadly admitted to American colleges and universities. Its language also records the limitations within which advocates framed female education: Gallaudet argues for women’s intellectual and rhetorical influence while explicitly identifying the law, ministry, and legislature as male domains. Foxing throughout; wrappers missing; text block clean and intact. Overall good condition. The address documents both the expansion of educational opportunities for American women and the gendered boundaries that continued to define arguments for female education in the 1820s.

Item #18232

Price: $285.00