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.
Catherine Kerrison is Associate Professor of History at Villanova University.
Table of Contents
1. Toward an Intellectual History of Early Southern Women2. "The Truest Kind of Breeding": Prescriptive Literature in the Early South3. Religion, Voice, and Authority4. Reading Novels in the South5. Reading, Race, and WritingConclusion: The Enduring Problem of Female Authorship and AuthorityPostscriptAbbreviations Notes Index
What People are Saying About This
Mary Kelley
In Catherine Kerrison's pathbreaking account of eighteenth-century Southern women, we are introduced to an intellectual history constituted in reading and writing. Highlighting women's engagement with novels and devotional literature, which schooled them in moral practice and cultural refinement, Kerrison demonstrates the importance of an informal education that taught women to see themselves as thinking subjects. We glimpse women of privilege who in writing as in reading fashioned a sense of self valorized by republican virtue and Protestant piety and laced with racial superiority. In bringing these women's voices to the fore, Kerrison has recovered the female architects of a southern society grounded in hierarchies of class and race.
Mary Beth Norton
Claiming the Pen is a revelation. Catherine Kerrison's extensive research into published and unpublished sources provides unparalleled insights into the hitherto hidden intellectual lives of early southern women. Her judicious analysis of such topics as novel reading and the impact of the slave system on elite white women's thinking will interest scholars in many fields.
Sheila Skemp
This is an important book on many levels. Its focus on women in the early South challenges notions that still linger about the dearth of intellectual activity in a region that was essentially rural and boasted few of the literary venues that characterized the northern and middle colonies. Just as the 'new political history' expands our understanding of the meaning of politics, so Kerrison's book expands the scope of intellectual history. It argues that southern women, like their northern counterparts, were able to participate in the process of shaping their own identity. They faced limits to their power, of course, but they were not passive victims of a male-dominated culture. Finally, the book reminds scholars that women in the South, although they were part of a distinctive regional culture, had ties to a broad-based transatlantic culture as well.
