Open Access Edition of Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries Written by Jewel A. Smith.

FAIN: DR-272623-20

Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)
Laurie Matheson (Project Director: March 2020 to August 2022)

This project will publish the book Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries, written by NEH Fellow Jewel A. Smith (NEH grant number FA-53416-07), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of $500 upon release of the open access book.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries
Year: 2022
ISBN: 978-0-252-0532
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Author: Jewel Smith
Editor: none
Translator: none
Abstract: Female seminaries in the nineteenth-century United States offered middle-class women the rare privilege of training in music and the liberal arts. A music background in particular provided the foundation for a teaching career, one of the few paths open to women. Jewel A. Smith opens the doors of four female seminaries, revealing a milieu where rigorous training focused on music as an artistic pursuit rather than a social skill. Drawing on previously untapped archives, Smith charts women's musical experiences and training as well as the curricula and instruction available to them, the repertoire they mastered, and the philosophies undergirding their education. She also examines the complex tensions between the ideals of a young democracy and a deeply gendered system of education and professional advancement. An in-depth study of female seminaries as major institutions of learning, Transforming Women's Education illuminates how musical training added to women's lives and how their artistic acumen contributed to American society.
Primary URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctv26xfvq4
Primary URL Description: JSTOR
Secondary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/63938
Secondary URL Description: Project MUSE
Type: Single author monograph

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