Key Words & Preliminary Biography

Preliminary Bibliography
The Boarding School: Or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils

“Propriety is that garb which becomes our situation and circumstances in life” (Foster 57).

Key Words:
“gender” and “fashion”
“gender” and “clothing”
“clothing” and “women”
“fashion” and “eighteenth century”
“female education”
“women" and "fashion" and "dress." limited by the time period (1790-1800)

Doak, Melissa, and Melissa Karetny.. "How Did Diverse Activists Shape the Dress Reform Movement, 1838-1881?." Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 3.0 (1999).

Finch, Martha L. "'Fashions of Worldly Dames: Separatist Discourses of Dress in Early Modern London, Amsterdam, and Plymouth Colony.” Church History 74.3 (2005): 494-533.
Kelly, Catherine E. In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Messer, Peter C. "Writing Women into History: Defining Gender and Citizenship in Post-Revolutionary America." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 28 (1999): 341-360.
Modestus. “On The Dress of Women.” Ladies Afternoon Visitor 1 (1807): 42

Octavius. “Affectation in Female Dress.” Weekly Visitory, or Ladies' Miscellany 2 (1804): 378.
Pettengill, Claire C. “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and The Boarding School.” Early American Literature 27 (1992): 185-203.

Rush, Benjamin. “Thoughts Upon Female Education.” The Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (Apr.1790): 209.

Smith, Chloe Wigston. "Practical Habits: Clothes, Women, and Fashion in the Eighteenth-Century Novel." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 67.9 (Mar. 2007): 3415-3415.

Quote, page 15-16

This is just a small observation I saw when starting to read this novel. The quote caught my eye (bottom of page 15, top of page 16) and I thought it fit in really well, considering that we, as English majors, put a lot of focus on reading.

"Reading is so common a part of education that the value of it is not duly estimated nor the manner of performing it sufficiently attended to. It is not the mere propriety of pronunciation accent and cadence which constitutes good reading. You must enter into the spirit of tho subject and feel interested in the matter before you can profit by the exercise. But you are so well acquainted with the manner of reading that the quality of books most worthy of your perusal is the only point on which I need to enlarge."
-The Boarding School, page 15-16

Even today I find that this quote holds true. During a service learning (I used to be an Education major), I attended to a second-grade classroom. My assignment was mostly to go over their reading with them one-by-one; I was a little upset when quizzing them. Each student could read through a passage quickly, but their comprehension basically told me they only truly read the first sentence. When I informed the teacher, she told me that her class was a hopeless case when it came to reading and none of them would get higher than they were now. It was almost heartbreaking, to know that a teacher didn't care enough to get the students to care about reading.

The second part of this quote is extremely true; you can't truly learn from a subject unless you're interested enough in it. It's a sad truth, but I feel like this novel pointed it out quickly, gaining the reader's attention along with it.