Little Women? The Female Mind at Work in Antebellum America
Louise Stevenson argues that girls growing up in mid-19th-century America were far more intellectually forceful and streetwise than often given credit for.
Most students pursuing an advanced degree of history before the 1970s would have thought women's intellectual life an unpromising subject. The classic works of American intellectual history seldom included women and rarely took their endeavours seriously. Intellectual historians did not recognise that they were defining 'intellectual' and 'intellectual life' in ways that excluded women. A sampling of the indices of surveys of American intellectual history reveal that none give women any sizable place. Ralph Henry Gabriel mentions four women in The Course of American Democratic Thought (1940, 2nd ed. 1956), Perry Miller one in the Life of the Mind in America (1965), Robert Skotheim none in American Intellectual Histories and Historians (1966), and Rush Welter three in The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (1975).
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