Claiming the pen : women and intellectual life in the early American South

Resource Information

The work Claiming the pen : women and intellectual life in the early American South represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Claiming the pen : women and intellectual life in the early American South

Title remainder

women and intellectual life in the early American South

Statement of responsibility

Catherine Kerrison

Creator

• Kerrison, Catherine, 1953-

Subject

• American literature -- Southern States -- History and criticism
• Electronic books
• Women -- Books and reading -- Southern States -- History -- 18th century
• Women and literature -- Southern States -- History -- 18th century
• Women authors, American -- Southern States -- History -- 18th century
• Women -- Southern States -- Intellectual life -- 18th century

Genre

• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

In 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South. Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice-both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqu p̌lots of novels-formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors. Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery

Member of

• hoopla (Digital media service)

Cataloging source

Midwest

Dewey number

305.48/9630975

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Target audience

adult