| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Catherine Kerrison. Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 265. $45.00.

Catherine Kerrison's book has an ambitious goal: to reclaim the intellectual history of early southern women. As Kerrison observes, American intellectual history has been heavily weighted toward New England; when this longstanding trend is combined with what Catherine Clinton called the "New Englandization" of women's history in her 1982 book, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (p. xv), the result is that southern women's intellectual life often has been ignored, minimized, or assumed to be nonexistent. Most studies of southern women's education, such as Christie Anne Farnham's The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (1994), focus on the late antebellum period and devote as much attention to "informal" lessons in morals and manners as they do to the "formal" curriculum in literature and the classics. To many observers, intellectual life seemed almost "inconceivable" (p. 4) for southern women until the mid-nineteenth century. Yet Kerrison argues that it is in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that it is possible to find "the origins of an intellectual tradition of southern women" (p. 3). According to Kerrison, elite white women in the early American South drew upon both revolutionary and religious writings to articulate an ideology of "female virtue" that enabled them to achieve "a new consciousness of themselves as agents in creating their own world" (p. 5).

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