Claiming an education: The transatlantic performance and circulation of intellectual identities in college women's writing, 1870--1900.

Abstract

Scholars of women's rhetoric, educational history, and composition studies have yet to account fully for the role of student writing in the formation of late nineteenth-century women's colleges and intellectual networks. <italic> Claiming an Education</italic> studies previously unexamined artifacts of college women's diaries, letters, poetry, and articles published in campus-based magazines or popular periodicals to reveal students' rhetorical strategies for achieving access to two elite men's universities and succeeding academically, though campus culture remained ambivalent, even hostile, toward women students. Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge and Radcliffe College at Harvard provide the primary historical sites for this project, which offers a deeper understanding of how the desire for education motivated women to cross the North Atlantic in multiple directions between 1870 and 1900. Beyond their physical crossings, these women facilitated the circulation of ideas about educated women by fostering a print culture that encouraged women to claim and perform knowledge and exert cultural influence through higher education. Chapter one draws on theories of epideictic rhetoric to demonstrate how institutional history, a sub-genre of educational history, perpetuates narrative values that obscure the collaborative labor flourishing in the shadows of celebrated founders. Chapter two reads the Inter-Collegiate Letters column in the Girton College magazine, <italic>The Girton Review,</italic> as a textual site where students built transatlantic social networks of college-educated women. Chapter three turns to Alice Mary Longfellow and Helen Gladstone to argue that the problematic dialectic of extraordinary/ordinary in narrative constructions of women's lives, labor, and writing clouds understandings of student influence in women's intellectual and institutional development. Chapter four studies the figure of the frustrated intellectual woman in the work of Amy Levy, a Newnham College student and Victorian writer, and illustrates how other student writers, Levy's peers, adopted a variety of intellectual personae to debate women's place at elite universities. Chapter five explores students' accounts of the academic difficulty they faced at college and their strategies for negotiating the gate-keeping nature of this difficulty through the creation of debating societies, study groups, and reading parties---all places to experiment with performances of the intellectual identities esteemed in prestigious academic environments.