| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900. By Caroline Winterer. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. xiv, 242 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8014-4163-9.)

This is a companion volume to the author's The Culture of Classicism (2002). One of the primary functions of classical education through the early twentieth century was as a line of demarcation between a social and intellectual elite of men who received a classical education in school and the rest of men who did not; it was an even more rigid line of demarcation between the sexes. Women were expected to be literate, and among the upper classes they might even learn modern languages, but Latin and Greek were male preserves; for a woman to aspire to them was both absurd and dangerous, a presumptuous reaching after male privileges—rather like wearing trousers. Nonetheless, as Caroline Winterer shows in this interesting, thoroughly researched book, some women in the revolutionary period were determined to claim a role in the new nation through participation in its "classical" public culture. As women started to write for public prints, for example, to adopt a classical non de plume was to demand a speaking role in the intellectual conversation of the new America.

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