Young Girls.

Limited opportunities for schooling were available to girls and young women. Even though Protestant belief acknowledged the same route to salvation for men and women, and thus the same need for literacy, female education in the early nineteenth century ranged from inferior to nonexistent. As the push for school reform increased during the 1830s and 1840s, however, popular attitudes began to shift concerning the education of girls. Although women's intelligence was considered different and perhaps inferior to men's, females were believed capable and deserving of common school education in order to become upstanding moral citizens and more important because as future wives and mothers they needed to pass such solid moral training on to their families. Benjamin Rush, DeWitt Clinton, Emma Hart Willard, and others took up the argument that female education was necessary for this crucial domestic role. Although inequality...