The Peabody Sisters Quotes

“believed underlay all genuine learning.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“something quite radical for her time and place: that personal choice and individual freedom were innate, and fully consistent with social responsibility and a “Godly” way of life. Following from the discussion she’d had with Channing about Coleridge’s term transcendental, she called her new philosophy “transcendentalism.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“As a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher feeling grateful for a growing “intimacy” with the man whose mind she most admired, Elizabeth contented herself with Channing’s praise. Indeed, she was “startled with mingled terror & delight” by his words, she wrote. She did not stop to question his instructions to employ her “deeper insights” in service to others. Elizabeth was ready to dispute orthodox theology, but not to challenge the social orthodoxy that told her teaching school was the single suitable occupation for a woman of intellect, especially when Channing himself upheld the convention.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Mary was relieved to see Elizabeth so steadily engaged. “She has been living this winter upon Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dr. Channing,” Mary”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“During their weekly conversations, Channing introduced Elizabeth to the work of the British Romantic poets—especially Coleridge and Wordsworth, who had befriended Channing as the apostle of a new American spirituality during his 1822 tour of Europe. He loaned Elizabeth a volume of Coleridge’s essays, and they discussed the poet’s use of the word transcendental. Channing was grappling with the concept in his own theology, and he confided to Elizabeth that he now believed “the idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“The next week brought the start of Mary’s Hallowell school, and of Eliza beth’s employment as a governess.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Elizabeth had abruptly resigned from the Blue Stocking Club in order to study Greek on Tuesday evenings with the new Unitarian minister in Hallowell, she grew concerned. Now every night but Sunday was given over to scholarly pursuits. Was Elizabeth burning her bridges with Hallowell society? As if this were not enough, Elizabeth was planning to teach herself German as well. She was determined to read the Romantic philosophers in their original texts, and she had made a ten-mile trip into Augusta to consult the region’s only expert in German literature, the Calvinist minister Benjamin Tappan, on how to study the language.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“study for deeper, more personal reasons: for the “pleasure . . . derived from the feeling of energy that arises in the mind from the keen exercise of its powers in metaphysical, scientific or mathematical reasoning.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“They ran academies for boys preparing for college, and for boys “preparing for mercantile professions who may want education superior to common schools,” as one school’s prospectus read. They offered special classes, mainly for boys, in drawing, music, languages, writing, and dancing. Women, by contrast, taught small classes of girls, or sometimes groups of young children of both sexes, in their homes or rented rooms. In 1822, there were more than fifty such “schoolmistresses” listing their services in the Boston directory, and probably just as many women teaching school without bothering to register their addresses. Girls in these “primary schools” learned little more than the basics of reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, and needlepoint.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Yet in the 1820s, virtually all trades and professions were segregated by sex. Only men could become lawyers, merchants, ministers, surgeons, booksellers, musicians, cordwainers, rope makers, goldbeaters, bricklayers, house-wrights, victuallers, masons, bakers—just a small portion of the occupations men listed alongside their addresses in the Boston city directories of the time. Teaching was the single profession open to both sexes, and even that had its hierarchy. Men taught Boston’s public, or “common” schools.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“The city that Elizabeth looked out on that spring was in the midst of changes far greater than any since the Revolutionary era. During the 1820s, Boston transformed itself from a harbor dependent on foreign imports to one rich in exports from the rising inland mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. Independent proprietors built new wharves and bridges. A toll road stretching west across swampland between Boston and Brookline was laid out atop an ambitious system of dykes that provided waterpower for scores of new mills. Known as the Mill Dam, this last project served as the underpinnings for future expansion into the Back Bay. In the next decades, Boston, once just a tight fist of land thrust into the Atlantic, would nearly double in landmass: its seven hills were razed and its riverbeds dredged for landfill to support a population swelling past 50,000.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“But I remained fascinated with the years when the sisters were starting out in life, when American Romanticism was born of a widespread yearning for spiritual and intellectual transcendence, and certain women and men of Boston and Concord, the Peabody sisters among them, banded together to create what was then called “the newness”: the movement that startled our young nation into a vibrant maturity. These were the years when Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody grew up and fell in love—with books, art, ideas, and men.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“literature; Emerson, in religion and philosophy. Rivalrous themselves, none of the three men trusted or even much liked one another. But all three were comfortable in the Peabody sisters’ front parlor and found inspiration there. In the back parlor, two of them married Peabody women. Marriage was never”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“This revolution would transform the nation from a parochial theocracy, in which governors still declared statewide “Fast Days” for religious observance and towns taxed their citizens to support a parish minister, to a modern, secular democracy, in which the lecture platform replaced the pulpit as the source of wisdom and revelation.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“The three sisters would come of age in an era now known as the American Renaissance, when arts and ideas flourished in an environment of intellectual freedom made possible by the new Republic and its visionary Constitution. Boston,”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“The community had remained “remarkably healthy” during the family’s stay, according to Dr. Peabody, except for one profitable outbreak of smallpox in a neighboring town.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“She turned her efforts instead to a piece of needlepoint that she intended to present to one of her accusers. She was studying grammar, arithmetic, and geography as well, but it was for her decorative sewing—the symbol of refinement for women of leisure—that she had received the sharpest criticism from the mothers of her students. She resented spending her time on such frivolous work, but she poured into this needlepoint project all the energy she had previously given to pressing her suit with Nathaniel. She visited schools all over Boston to compare her piece with others, and at last felt satisfied that hers, a portrait of George Washington—whose death in 1799 had made him a popular subject for memorials in thread—was as well done as any she saw. She could return to teaching with full confidence in her abilities, if not in her clean reputation”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“mind has no sex”: there was no limit to what Sophia or any girl might learn. Yet gender did affect the uses of knowledge.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Elizabeth’s methods would have been extraordinary in any school setting in post-Revolutionary America. But she had inherited a disposition toward experiment from her mother, and indeed it has been observed by historians of education that “many of the most important curricular innovations of the nineteenth century were the products of women educators who were free to ‘experiment’ in their schools for girls.” It was in boys’ schools, both private and public, that rote learning, competition for class rank, and corporal punishment went largely unquestioned.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Once settled in her Boston school, Mary took the children out on the Common twice a day to coast on its snowbanks in winter and, when spring arrived, to observe flowers and butterflies and learn their names and growth cycles. As her small pupils grew to know and love the open park, in which all paths seemed to lead to the elegant brick State House at the top of the hill, she gave them their first lessons in history and civil government by describing the town fathers’ efforts to establish and then preserve the communal land over the two centuries since the founding of the city. Mary made a story of it, just as in the classroom she relied on telling stories and fables or reading aloud to cultivate a love of literature. She taught her young pupils to read individually and only when she decided each one was ready, starting with single words for objects they had learned to care about—“bird, nest, tree”—then helping the child recognize those words in printed versions of the tales she had already recited. Mary would never “force helpless little ones” to memorize the alphabet, she wrote, before “every letter is interesting to them from the position it holds in some symbolic word.” The six-year-old boy on whom she had first tried this experiment years earlier in Salem had learned to read fluently within six weeks.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“It mattered little to anyone outside the Transcendental coterie that Bronson Alcott had finally written something publishable—his “Orphic Sayings”—for the opening issue; or that an unemployed schoolteacher named Henry David Thoreau had his first piece published in its pages.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“What had become of the girl who sought out British Socinian texts all on her own, argued over Swedenborgian theology with adults three times her age, read the New Testament thirty times in one summer, and taught herself Hebrew so that she could make her own translation of the Old Testament? There had been many obstacles. Because of financial hardship, she had been “thrown too early” into the working world, teaching long hours when she might have studied and written more. And there was the fact of her sex. Without the option of college or a profession, Elizabeth had not known how or where to apply herself. She had looked to men of genius to confirm her talents and grown “dependent on the daily consolations of friendship.” She could see now that she had “constantly craved . . . assurances” that should have “come from within.” Yet”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Little Waldo was still an “it” to his father, who might show him off to visitors and speculate on the lessons of parenthood, but would never have to feed the baby or change his infant dresses. Lidian was upstairs in bed, unable to sit up, daunted by the prospect, at thirty-four, of caring for a second very real “him” along with a large household always open to her husband’s friends. If Waldo had the ability to make his intellectual companions “feel free,” he seemed to have the opposite effect on his new wife. She would recover from this birth and bear three more children in the next eight years, but increasingly Lidian sought refuge in illness and, when well, in an obsessive attention to the details of housekeeping,”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Waldo Emerson may have been a prize catch—“mine own angel-man,” Lidian called him in an early letter to her sister. Yet becoming the wife of the free-lance philosopher also required “the giving up of an existence she thoroughly enjoyed,” as one of the Emerson children later wrote, describing their mother’s transformation from self-sufficient intellectual to genius domi.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“The American Scholar,” as Emerson titled the speech for a press run of five hundred copies that swiftly sold out, pointedly omitted any acknowledgment of Harvard’s role in educating the rising generation. Rather it was an impassioned appeal to the individual man—any man—to “plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide.” The speech was a hymn to self-education, to the scholar as a man of action, and an implicit denunciation of life within the academy. Oliver Wendell Holmes would later call it “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” “I”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Elizabeth might revere Waldo Emerson as an oracle of truth, but Waldo held Elizabeth in high esteem too. Her 1830 translation of de Gérando’s Self-Education inspired him, and her manuscript translation of the French mystic Guillaume Oegger’s True Messiah had provided “good things” as well. At this formative time in his life, Waldo Emerson found in Elizabeth Peabody both a woman who knew the ins and outs of the publishing world—she would advise him on dealings with their mutual publisher, James Munroe—and a raconteur with the “authority of a learned professor or high literary celebrity in her talk.” For the most part, as Elizabeth had intuited, Waldo was able to disregard the less compelling aspects of her personality that, to a man whose feminine ideal was still the nineteen-year-old invalid bride he had lost to tuberculosis, were inclined to “offend,” and accept her as a fellow being of “infinite capacity.” In”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Elizabeth succeeded at last with Record of a School because she was performing a literary version of what she was beginning to recognize as her vocation in life: to nurture and promote the men she admired, helping them to achieve a greater range of action than she could ever hope to attain as a woman. Elizabeth didn’t receive the same recognition from Record of a School that she would have if it had been her school, her theory. But the men whose minds she hoped to capture would not have paid attention to a woman’s book about a girls’ school. And she might never have had the self-assurance to write such a book about a school of her own. Playing the role of facilitator—or “Recorder,” as she referred to herself in later editions—freed Elizabeth first to produce and then to promote the book more vigorously than she ever had one of her own, without appearing unfeminine or immodest in character, an aspect of her reputation that she continued to care about even as she habitually disregarded the niceties of dress. To”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Although he had no dramatic successes to report as yet, Howe knew that he could win supporters by showing them a few blind children working together in a schoolroom to master the rudiments of spelling, mathematics, and even geography from specially crafted globes—unthinkable anywhere in the United States until now.”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“Unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, Sophia accepted Allston’s standard. For Sophia, it had always been Doughty and Harding and Allston who were “masterly.” They “embodied” art in a way that the turbaned Catherine Scollay in her attic studio never could. If women had a recognized place in the art world it was as muse or model—or wife. Yet, with the exception of the Reverend Channing’s question, no one spoke of art in terms of gender. Because it was unacknowledged, the gap between a young woman with talent and a man of accomplishment could seem an unbridgeable chasm. It was safer for Sophia to paint covers for ladies’ card cases or, at most, copy paintings that offered a thrilling proximity to greatness. Neither would require an open admission of her own aspirations to greatness—aspirations that could easily go unfulfilled in the absence of adequate training. Sophia had seen what had happened to her oldest sister, whose naked desire to become “all and more than all, that those she loved would have her be” had exposed her to disappointment and failure. Sophia would not risk that. In”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters

“In Allston, as generous as he was with his praise and encouragement, Sophia had come face-to-face with the male art establishment and its aesthetic. She had encountered it before when she was hustled out of Thomas Doughty’s studio while a men’s painting class was in session. More recently, at a gathering in the Reverend Channing’s parlor, she had been stunned when the minister had quoted the influential British artist Henry Fuseli’s sneering observation that there was “no fist” in women’s painting—and then demanded Sophia’s response. Flustered, Sophia had “sunk away into my shell,” unable to speak, she confided in her journal. She had enough trouble summoning the confidence to paint each day, let alone defend women artists as a class. Channing’s question struck to the heart of Sophia’s ambivalence about taking the initiative to create original works of art. Virtually”
― Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters