Reviewed by Cynthia A. Kierner | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by Cynthia A. Kierner | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Cynthia A. Kierner, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South. By Catherine Kerrison. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. 281 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Catherine Kerrison describes her insightful and gracefully written book as a first step toward an intellectual history of early southern women, by which she means elite white women in Virginia and the Carolinas before 1820. Kerrison's basic narrative will be familiar to many readers. Southern women, she argues, became increasingly literate during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when evangelical religion and a new emphasis on motherhood justified their reading (and sometimes their writing, too) and enabled them to develop and sometimes assert a sense of self. This development occurred in the larger, limiting context of southern slave society. Women who benefited from their whiteness and elite class status became educated and at times articulate but, unlike some of their northern or English contemporaries, they were neither nonconformists nor protofeminists.	1
Kerrison's significant and original contribution lies in explaining how and why this process began during the colonial era. Her fine chapters on colonial women's reading and reception of conduct books and devotional literature can be read as prequels to Cathy N. Davidson's influential Revolution and the Word, which showed that women turned to novels for advice on how to navigate the moral and social shoals of daily life in postrevolutionary America.¹ Because few southern females received formal schooling, Kerrison also looks for evidence of informal education. Drawing on estate inventories, wills, account books, letters, commonplace books, and newspaper advertisements, she finds that propertied southerners had access to a growing range of books, some of which became central texts in young women's education.	2
Women in the southern colonies read devotional tracts, sermons, and especially conduct books; by midcentury, they also enjoyed equally moralistic (yet far more entertaining) English novels. The prescriptive writings of Richard Allestree, a seventeenth-century English clergyman whose patriarchal views comported well with southern social mores, were widely read. But so, too, were the more current secular works of James Fordyce and John Gregory, who lauded feminine virtue as a civilizing influence while nonetheless upholding masculine authority. By 1800 southern women increasingly embraced novels as their favorite "secular catechisms" (138), complementing rather than supplanting older prescriptive genres.	3
Though novels by female authors were common by 1800, most books southern women read were written, approved, and purchased by men. In the absence of candid letters and diaries, especially for the earlier period, Kerrison invokes colonization theory to explain women's relationship to these texts. "One way of looking at the gender relations this system of education perpetuates," she suggests, "is to think of it as a colonial relationship" (19). Elite white men presumed the inferiority of the colonized (in this case, white women) and adopted an educational regimen to enforce the debility and dependence of this subject people. Kerrison argues persuasively that reading encouraged women to see their own interests as congruent with those of their male colonizers and to embrace feminine subservience as concomitant to the privileges of whiteness and social rank.	. . .

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