(Download) "Wesleyan Female College of Wilmington, Delaware: A College Before Its Time?(Article 17) (Report)" by American Education History Journal # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Wesleyan Female College of Wilmington, Delaware: A College Before Its Time?(Article 17) (Report)
- Author : American Education History Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 210 KB
Description
Opening in 1837, Wesleyan Female Seminary became by 1855 one of the small number of colleges for women in the United States. The question is to what extent Wesleyan was a true college as that word was understood at the time, along with the wider issue of what constituted a college as the concept became transformed during the nineteenth century. In his famous study, Thomas Woody was unimpressed with the early female colleges (Woody 1929). However, he overestimated the permanence of the definition of a college as an institution which was, in fact, evolving in its curriculum and purpose as noted by the expansion of both electives and scientific studies in men's colleges of the middle 19th century (Brubacher and Rudy 1958, chap. 6). The original Wesleyan Female Seminary opened as a private enterprise under the tutelage of President Reverend Solomon Prettyman. The Philadelphia and Baltimore Conferences of the Methodist Church supported it as best they could by means of a stream of pronouncements to the many Methodist Churches in the region asking them to support the new school by sending donations and their daughters to the school. Female seminaries had existed since the late colonial period. They were meant for daughters of the wealthy as finishing schools rather than as institutions of intellectual rigor. The young women were often quite young and took subjects at the elementary level, along with "accomplishments" such as piano, embroidery, and vocal music. Seminaries were designed to fit young women for marriage and rarely offered Latin or Greek, the staples of the male college. The seminaries were also known for a heavy dose of religion, close ties of the teachers to students in a home-like manner, and careful control over all aspects of student development (Horowitz 1984, 32).
 "Wesleyan Female College of Wilmington, Delaware: A College Before Its Time?(Article 17) (Report)" by American Education History Journal # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}