Publishing Respectability: Almira Spencer and the Young Ladies' Journal of Literature and Science

Abstract

Almira Spencer’s Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science (1830-31) was the rare magazine both published and edited by a woman in the early nineteenth century and illustrates how such publications were creative and capitalist ventures that allowed women to exercise an unusual amount of freedom in business and exert social influence. Spencer's magazine was an instrument for expressing her opinions, an occasion to be an arbiter of middle-class values, and a means to earning a living. Spencer harnessed her experience as a respectable woman, mother, and teacher to guide, inform, and educate the daughters of America's middle class through a magazine carefully crafted to consider their unique intellectual needs, moral responsibilities, and role in society. By launching her opinions and judgement into the public arena through a magazine, Spencer embodied both the possibilities of empowerment and obstacles of constraint in middle-class women’s lives in the 1820s and 1830s.

Notes

1 “Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, September 3, 1830; “Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science,” Baltimore Patriot, September 7, 1830; “Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science,” Connecticut Mirror, September 25, 1830.

2 “Young Ladies’ Journal,” Baltimore Gazette; “Young Ladies’ Journal,” Baltimore Patriot; “Young Ladies’ Journal,” Connecticut Mirror.

3 James L. Machor, Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820-1865 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 27.

4 Robert J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 129–130.

5 William Ellery Channing, Self-Culture (Boston, MA: James Munroe & Co., 1839). Channing was the leading Unitarian theologian of the early nineteenth century.

6 Machor, Reading Fiction in Antebellum America, 23–24. See also Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially chapter 4.

7 Mrs. Townshend Stith, Thoughts on Female Education (Philadelphia, PA: Clark & Raser, 1831), 29; “Mrs. Catherine Stith’s Seminary for Young Ladies,” Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, VA), September 24, 1830.

8 Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), especially chapter 4.

9 “Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science,” Connecticut Mirror (Hartford, CT), September 25, 1830.

10 The run of the first rendition of the Young Ladies' Journal consisted of thirteen issues, however, the microfilm examined for this research was missing the October 1831 issue. As will be discussed later, a second iteration of the Young Ladies’ Journal consisted of a much shorter run.

11 The scholarship on women and magazines during this era is voluminous. On print culture see Amy Beth Aronson, Taking Liberties: Early Women's Magazines and Their Readers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Anna Luker Gilding, “Preserving Sentiments: American Women’s Magazines of the 1830s and the Networks of Antebellum Print Culture,” American Periodicals 23, no. 2 (2013): 156–171; Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History Of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). On readership see Mary Kelley, "Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America,” The Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (September 1996): 401–424.

12 An example of the scholarship on these women: Joanne Dobson, “Sex, Wit, and Sentiment: Frances Osgood and the Poetry of Love,” American Literature (December 1993): 631–650; “‘The Dearest Sacrifice’: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and the Celibate Life,” American Nineteenth Century History 8, no. 1, 51-79; Melissa Ladd Teed, “A Passion for Distinction: Lydia Huntley Sigourney and the Creation of a Literary Reputation,” New England Quarterly 77, no. 1 (March 2004): 51–69. For women writers in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace: Kathleen Endres and Theresa L. Lueck, eds., Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong, eds., Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).

13 Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

14 Robert Wuthnow, American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Wuthnow argues that the boundaries of the development of what was meant by middle class in the nineteenth century were defined by negative examples of what it did not represent.

15 Spencer would operate schools for twenty years in at least ten locations in four different cities: Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and New York. “Mrs. A Spencer and Miss Handy,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), October 25, 1821; Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 82-91. Margaret A. Nash, “‘A Triumph of Reason’: Female Education in the New Republic,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925, eds. Nancy Beadie and Kimberly Tolley (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 72–78. Educational opportunities for advanced learning were primarily available to white, upper-class or middle-class families. Poor and black families had limited access to private schools and seminaries for their daughters.

16 Nash, “‘A Triumph of Reason,’” in Chartered Schools, 72-78.

17 Zboray, A Fictive People, 9-14.

18 Heather Haveman, “Antebellum Literary Culture and the Evolution of American Magazines,” Poetics 32 (2004): 11.

19 Heather Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community and Print Culture, 1741–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 26.

20 Amy Aronson, “Contesting Gender Through Journalism: Revising Women’s Identity in The Lily,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, eds. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris, Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 228.

21 Baltimore Sun, January 30, 1845. Spencer’s obituary cites her age as fifty, making it likely she was born around 1795. Vital Records of Granville, Massachusetts to the Year 1850 (Boston: New England Historic and Genealogical Society, 1914), 55. Spencer was baptized in Granville, Massachusetts, in 1804. U.S Presbyterian Church Records, 1701–1970, Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society/Ancestry.com, n.p. White G. and Almira Spencer are listed as the parents of Marcia and Mary Ann Spencer in the girls' baptismal records. Poulson's American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), August 28, 1824. Spencer is identified as the “widow of Dr. Spencer” in an advertisement for her boarding school when she would have been about thirty, although it’s likely she was a widow when she began teaching in 1821.

22 “Mrs. A Spencer and Miss Handy,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), October 25, 1821; Ferdinand J. Smith, The Transition from Franklin Medical School to the Keokuk College of Medicine of the State University of Iowa (Milford, Iowa, 1913), 29; Alfred Averill Knapp, Nicholas Knapp Genealogy (Winter Park, FL, 1953), 313. Moses Knapp was a student at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1825–26.

23 “Mrs. A Spencer and Miss Handy,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), October 25, 1821; “Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies,” The National Gazette (Philadelphia), August 30, 1823; “Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies,” The National Gazette, August 24, 1824; “Mrs. Spencer’s Seminary,” The National Gazette (Philadelphia), August 30, 1823.

24 Wendy Gamber, “Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in History,” The Business History Review 72, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 204. See also Claudia Goldin, “The Economic Status of Women in the Early Republic: Quantitative Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (Winter 1986): 375-404; Susan Ingalls Lewis, “Female Entrepreneurs in Albany, 1840–1885,” Business and Economic History 21 (1992): 65–73; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 204–210.

25 S.J. Kleinberg, “Women’s Employment, 1865–1920,” in Women in the United States, 1830–1945 (London: Palgrave), 105; Gamber, “Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in History,” 189. These numbers overwhelmingly apply to white women.

26 “Boarding & Day School for Young Ladies,” Philadelphia Recorder, September 4, 1824.

27 Connecticut Mirror (Hartford, CT), September 11, 1830.

28 “Spencer’s School,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, August 4, 1824.

29 “Young Ladies [sic] Journal,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser [from the Troy Watchman (Troy, NY)], October 7, 1831.

30 Eugene Fauntleroy Cordell, The Medical Annals of Maryland, 1799-1899 (Baltimore: The Medical and Chirurgical Society of the State of Maryland, 1903), 469. Elwood Roberts, Biographical Annals of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, vol. 2 (New York: T. S. Benham & Company, 1904), 359. “Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science,” Baltimore Patriot, August 31, 1830.

31 Another brother, Abiram Knapp, lived in nearby Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

32 “Young Ladies [sic] Journal,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser [from the Troy Watchman (Troy, NY)], October 7, 1831. Bertha Monica Stearns, “New England Magazines for Ladies, 1830–1860,” The New England Quarterly (October 1930): 630. Sterns writes that Spencer published the Young Ladies’ Journal in Baltimore because “Boston did not prove warmly appreciative” of it, although health reasons seem to be the real reason behind Spencer’s decision.

33 Pat Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 44.

34 Jonathan Wells, “A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth-Century South,” American Nineteenth Century History (June 2008): 165–182.

35 Jan Bakker, “Another Dilemma of an Intellectual in the Old South: Caroline Gilman, the Peculiar Institution, and Greater Rights for Women in the Rose Magazines,” Southern Literary Journal (Fall 1984): 12–13. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Female Poets of America (Philadelphia: Henry C. Baird, 1852), 102.

36 Almira Spencer, “American Poets,” Young Ladies’ Journal, February 1831, 173. Spencer wrote about Ware and Hale with some degree of familiarity. After The Bower of Taste ceased publication in 1830, Spencer wrote she hoped Ware would not “resign her pen with the editorial chair; —but continue to illuminate the literary hemisphere with the brilliancy of her wit.” She praised Hale, noting she was “conducting a literary periodical in Boston.”

37 Those with brief lifespans included The Ladies’ Magazine (1792–1793); the Ladies’ Museum (five issues in 1800); Lady’s Weekly Miscellany (1805–1806); and Ladies’ Magazine (February 1819–August 1819).

38 Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 24–26, 82. It was not until after the Civil War that advertising, rather than circulation, became the measure of a magazine's success.

39 Haveman, “Antebellum Literary Culture and the Evolution of American Magazines,” 14.

40 Sarah Hale, Ladies’ Magazine, January 1829, 5.

41 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, March 1831, 237; emphasis in original.

42 Boston Recorder, May 23, 1828. On schools in Boston, see Jacqueline Barbara Carr. “Marketing Gentility: Boston’s Businesswomen, 1780-1830,” The New England Quarterly 82, no. 1 (2009): 35-36. On pedagogical methods see Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 88, 90.

43 “Mrs. Spencer’s Seminary for Young Ladies,” Baltimore Patriot, October 8, 1832.

44 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, February 1831, 200; emphasis in original.

45 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, December 1830, 115.

46 Spencer, “Our Own Scrutoire,” Young Ladies’ Journal, August 1831, 439-440.

47 William Sullivan, The Political Class Book: Intended to Instruct the Higher Classes in Schools in the Origin, Nature, and Use of Political Power (Boston: Carter, Hendee & Co.), 122.

48 Spencer, “Our Own Scrutoire,” Young Ladies’ Journal, August 1831, 459.

49 Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003), 35, 52.

50 “Formation of Coral Islands,” Young Ladies’ Journal, October 1830, 24–27; “The Bread-Fruit Tree,” Young Ladies’ Journal, December 1830, 103–105; “Eclipse of the Sun,” Young Ladies’ Journal, January 1831, 146–148.

51 O., “Pretty Pastimes,” Young Ladies’ Journal, February 1831, 188–189; O., “Pretty Pastimes,” Young Ladies’ Journal, April 1831, 266–270. “Pretty Pastimes” did not warn of the risks associated with handling some of the hazardous chemicals used in the experiments, such as mercury and highly corrosive nitric acid.

52 O., “Pretty Pastimes,” Young Ladies’ Journal, February 1831, 187.

53 “Mrs. Spencer’s Seminary for Young Ladies,” Baltimore Patriot, October 8, 1832.

54 Ann Douglas, introduction to Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), vii. According to Douglas, Charlotte Temple was America's best-selling book until Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 8. Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho, was a best-selling novelist 1790s and her work remained immensely popular in the United States.

55 Spencer, “To the Public,” Young Ladies’ Journal, October 1830, 4; emphasis in original.

56 Spencer, “To the Public,” 4.

57 Spencer, “Hints on Matrimony,” Young Ladies’ Journal, November 1831, 64.

58 C. De F., "Rebecca Thornton,” Young Ladies’ Journal, November 1831, 469.

59 C. De F., “Rebecca Thornton,” 470.

60 Mrs. S.C. Hall (Anna Maria Hall), “May Douglas,” Young Ladies’ Journal, November 1830, 70. The story of May Douglas was excerpted from Hall’s Chronicles of a School-Room (1830).

61 Spencer, Young Ladies’ Journal, September 1831, 480.

62 Lydia Huntley Sigourney, “‘Twas but a Babe,” Young Ladies’ Journal, October 1830, 14-15; Sigourney, “Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Nottingham,” Young Ladies’ Journal, November 1830, 54–55; Sigourney, “The Friend,” Young Ladies’ Journal, February 1831, 161–164.

63 G., “The Eye,” Young Ladies’ Journal, November 1830, 65–66.

64 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, December 1830, 114.

65 Further linking Spencer and Garrison was his favorable review of the Young Ladies’ Journal the following year in his new anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, February 26, 1831. Spencer published the work of at least two other abolitionists: Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, who would later write a biography of African American poet Phillis Wheatley, and editor and poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

66 Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). Chambers-Schiller argues that in the era before the Civil War many women rejected domesticity and chose autonomy, selfhood, and the cult single blessedness over marriage.

67 Spencer, “Hints on Matrimony,” Young Ladies’ Journal, November 1831, 65.

68 Spencer, “Hints on Matrimony,” 65.

69 Spencer, “Hints on Matrimony,” 65.

70 Spencer, “Hints on Matrimony,” 67.

71 Spencer, “To the Public,” Young Ladies’ Journal, October 1830; emphasis in original.

72 Spencer, “To the Public,” 5.

73 Spencer, “To the Public,” 5.

74 Boston Traveler, October 19, 1830; Christian Watchman, October 22, 1830.

75 The publishers of Connecticut Mirror also distributed the Young Ladies’ Journal, but there is no reason to think they were not honest in their assessment of the magazine. Connecticut Mirror, December 25, 1830.

76 “Young Ladies [sic] Journal,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser [from the Troy Watchman (Troy, NY)], October 7, 1831; emphasis in original.

77 National Journal, November 4, 1831.

78 “Baltimore Female Literature,” Boston Evening Transcript, February 19, 1831. Entreating—and often demanding—to pay outstanding subscription fees was not an uncommon practice among magazine and newspaper editors, especially when subscriptions were the primary means of revenue.

79 A., “Extracts of a letter from New Haven,” Young Ladies’ Journal, August 1831, 439; emphasis in original.

80 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, December 1830, 113; emphasis in original.

81 Old Bachelor, “Letter to the Editor,” Young Ladies’ Journal, March 1831, 211.

82 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, December 1830, 113.

83 Okker, Our Sister Editors, 23. Okker called this the “sisterly editorial voice.” John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 49. Spencer’s cheerfulness set her apart from Sara Hale in the opinion one female contemporary, who described her as having a career that was a “tribute to the respectabilities, decorums and moralities of life, devoid of its enthusiasms.”

84 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, February 1831, 198.

85 Spencer, “Our Own Scrutoire,” Young Ladies’ Journal, September 1831, 480.

86 “Prospectus,” Baltimore Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser, August 31, 1830.

87 Spencer, “Hamilton’s Monument,” Young Ladies’ Journal, September 1831, 473. The image appears to be an etching after an 1806 painting by artist James Ward.

88 Spencer, “Our Own Fire-Side,” Young Ladies’ Journal, December 1830, 113.

89 Spencer, Young Ladies’ Journal, September 1831, 480. A proof is a preliminary copy of a publication intended for review by the editor and printing was known as the “black art” because the hands, fingers, and arms of typesetters were stained by the black ink used in the printing process.

90 Spencer, Young Ladies’ Journal, September 1831, 480.

91 Diane Zimmerman Umble, “Sarah Josepha Buell Hale,” Women in Communication: A Biographical Sourcebook, ed. Nancy Signorielli (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 194. Originally quoted in Isabelle Webb Entrikin, Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1946), 57.

92 “Mrs. Spencer’s Seminary for Young Ladies,” American and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), September 25, 1832.

93 “Married,” The National Gazette (Philadelphia), August 25, 1835.

94 “Literary Intelligence,” The New-Yorker, December 9, 1840, 221.

95 New-York Herald, December 15, 1840.

96 New York Mechanic, April 17, 1841; Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory, 1841-42 (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1841), 410.

97 “Died on Tuesday morning last,” American and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), January 30, 1845.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paula Hunt

Paula Hunt, Ph.D., is an independent scholar whose research focuses on the history of American journalism.