Excellent talk by Victoria Ott on Young 19th Century Women in Female Academies

Today, Victoria Ott, Associate Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern University, offered a presentation on young women in the Confederacy who attended school during the Civil War. It was a fascinating talk. According to Ott, the parents of such women often enrolled them in school to get them out of harm's way. During their time away from home, some young women took liberties they might not have taken before. For example, some engaged in courtship rituals, such as writing letters, with Confederate soldiers and on occasion, Union ones. Ott, who was born in Alabama, provided background on her interest in young women in the Confederacy. As a child, she was introduced to the motion picture "Gone With the Wind." By the time she got to graduate school, she needed a dissertation topic. Why not look for some real-life Scarlett O'Hara's in the archive? She never found such a woman. She did find women who were sometimes frustrated by how the war was changing their lives. Among such women were ones who protected the memory of the Old South. Her talk posed interesting tensions with the core purpose of this class, which is to look for emerging urban life. As I told the audience in my opening remarks, the issue of young women and education in the years surrounding the Civil War was fascinating without even thinking about cities. But indeed, the class tried to do just that. The longing of Ella Ballard, one young woman who attended a female academy in Frankfort, Kentucky, for a simple watch serves as an example of the emerging consumer culture that accompanied city life. Via an antebellum letter, she asked her father Rice Ballard, a Mississippi and Arkansas planter (and historical actor in my recently published book) to buy her one while he was in New Orleans. She even chatised him for forgetting her request. A postbellum letter from former University of Alabama President Josiah Gorgas to his two daughters Mary and Jessie, students at Sewanee, University of the South, uncovers his query about the outcome of a baseball game, a sport that was first played in New York City. Finally, Elizabeth Townsend, a young Huntsville, Alabama, woman of mixed race, was enrolled in Wilberforce University along with her sister and cousins on the eve of the Civil War. She traveled to Ohio on boats and a train, two forms of transportation that announced an urbanizing world. A letter she wrote in May 1861, just a month after the war began, finds her not addressing this momentous event, but instead a social she recently attended at school. Without question, these were privileged young women. Still, their lives were not without challenges. Surviving evidence permits us to see their small claims on power in a still patriarchal world. To which topic will this class turn next fall? I do not yet have a clue. Perhaps we will return to this subject. There's still so much to learn and recover in the archive. Special thanks to the students: Chris Edmunds, Morgan Johnson, Lin Kabachia, William Newman, Adam Rosenberg and Sarah Yielding for their enthusiasm and openness to learning. I want to also thank Kari Frederickson, Chair of UA's History Department; Lydia Ellington, Director of Gorgas House, Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society,Joshua Rothman, Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, History Department Office Manager Christina Kircharr, and my colleagues Jimmy Mixson and John Beeler, for their support.

Young Women in Higher Education Exhibit 4-5:30pm Dec. 2

Reprinted from my active learner blog Catalogue: The end of the semester is quickly approaching. The students enrolled my "The Nineteenth Century City" course have completed the work for our December 2 presentation. There, we will present our research on young women and education in early Alabama and an urbanizing America. Between the 1830s and 1920, cities increasingly grew in the United States owing partly to the invention of the steamboat and railroads, two technologies that helped people move through space more easily. Historian Gunther Barth has argued that within this period an urban “culture” emerged via the arrival of apartment houses, department stores, baseball, vaudeville houses, and metropolitan newspapers. In such things, as he writes, people with very different racial and ethnic backgrounds managed to find a “common humanity” and learned how to cope in congested spaces. Notably, Barth did not look to churches or institutions of higher learning for signs of an urbanizing America. This was possibly because in those two spaces he saw more homogeneous populations, or people whose backgrounds were similar. The students in this course were charged with looking for signs of an urban culture in the lives of young women who attended college during the nineteenth century or at the turn of the century, in and outside of Alabama. Certainly a female academy existed in Tuscaloosa even before the University of Alabama opened in Tuscaloosa in 1831. Some such students include Addie Lovett Findlay whose diploma is pictured here, and the coeds who lived with the family of a Bryce Hospital administrator. They are also pictured. As this exhibit hopes to demonstrate, young women in a city that still feels like a college town even today were becoming sophisticated people in the years surrounding the Civil War. The students studied several documents to learn more about such women and others in West and North Alabama. Among the documents was an 1861 letter from a Huntsville, Alabama, girl of mixed race who attended Wilberforce after being recently manumitted. Ultimately, the class saw how historians interpret the past while often relying on very little information. The result was four displays that will be presented on 4-5:30 pm at the university's Gorgas House. Use this interactive map for directions. There will also be a silent auction of photography inspired by the nineteenth century city theme taken and curated by the students. We are pleased to have Birmingham Southern University Associate Professor of History Victoria Ott as our guest speaker. Her talk is titled "A Safe Place to Hide?: The Role of Female Academies in the Confederate South." This event is co-sponsored by the Summersell Center for the Study of the South.

Visit to Gorgas House sets off semester-long query

Lydia Ellington, Dir. of UA's Gorgas House, speaks to class.

This year's "The Nineteenth Century City" class reflects the decline in enrollment seen in some courses in the History department and elsewhere on campus. My colleagues and I are trying to sort through this. 

In the meantime, I am determined to keep course content interesting. I think we're off to a good start. Our class of seven students visited yesterday Gorgas House, an antebellum house on the University of Alabama's campus. There, we learned about the Gorgas family, among them Mary and Jessie, two daughters who were permitted to obtain an education. That they did juxtaposes nicely with our interest in female academies, or young women in institutions of higher learning in the United States between the 1830s and 1920, the window to which historian Gunther Barth points as being a place to see emerging urban life. 

After the visit to the Gorgas House, the students were given two letters written by Josiah Gorgas, former UA President. The recipients were his daughters who were studying at Sewanee, The University of the South in Tennessee. 

In one letter, the elder Gorgas inquires about the outcome of a baseball game. This was intriguing as baseball is one of five things to which Barth points to announce the arrival of a modern urban culture in America. Barth states that it is around this game, which gradually becomes popular in the second half of the nineteenth century, that people of varying backgrounds learn to root for the same team, or share a "common humanity." 

Throughout the semester, the students will be challenged to see how young educated women figure into this common humanity. Who gets included in this narrative, I've asked them. Who gets left out? How do we find meaning in a generation of young women who seem to be forerunners to feminist ideas, among them Amelia Gorgas, Josiah's wife? She not only ran the University's Library, post office and infirmary when her husband became ill, but continued to successfully raise six children into adulthood.

One aside: Dr. William Gorgas, one of the Gorgas children and the 22nd Surgeon General of the United States Army, appears to have been an avid fan of baseball as Gorgas House displays his lifetime pass to the American League games. He is best known for helping the United States combat the impact of yellow fever during the building of the Panama Canal at the turn of the century.

Victoria Ott, guest speaker

Meanwhile, like last year and the year prior, the semester-long query will culminate in a class project. This year, the students will present a curated exhibit of primary sources at the Gorgas House. Victoria E. Ott, James A. Wood Associate Professor of History at Birmingham Southern University, will be our guest speaker.

Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, and Ian Crawford, House Manager of Jemison Manager, have generously offered their insight about Tuscaloosa's founding families to help us get started. Richter also shared diplomas and report cards that will also be helpful. Heartfelt thanks to Lydia Ellington, Director of Gorgas House,
for her assistance, too.