The codification of etiquette also underscored the explicitly social ends of an academy education. Far from cultivating intellect for its own sake, academies groomed young men and women to take their places on a larger stage, one that began immediately outside the academy yard. Consider, for example, the cautions, prohibitions, and exhortations for student behavior on the streets. On their way to and from school, students were to refrain from “uncouth noises and gestures.” They were to keep to the public roads and not trample across private property. They must not be “rude to any Person” and should extend themselves by “paying a handsome compliment to the passing stranger or citizen, by pulling off the hat or otherwise, as propriety & genteel conduct may require.” They were in short, to “manifest, by [their] whole deportment, respect for the quiet of the place,” and thereby “win the respect of the residents” for themselves and their teachers.47 The imperative to maintain good-neighbor status accounted for much of this concern. No academy could afford to have its students associated with rowdiness or impropriety by the surrounding community. But more than town-gown diplomacy was in play.
Admonitions about students’ public behavior, read alongside contemporary descriptions of students and reminiscences about academy life, reveal a selfconscious sense of young women and men on display. Especially in provincial towns and villages, where local academies were associated with brilliant careers and sparkling sociability, students constituted a special—and especially observed—group. This was as true in church as it was in the street or in the ballroom. Students at many academies attended church as members of a group, with the academy “family” sitting alongside the congregation’s other, natal families. Numbers alone would have rendered them conspicuous. But some students sought seats that afforded them maximum visibility. In Litchfield, for example, Sarah Pierce’s decorous young ladies preferred a “select” group of benches up front, where they were both free from immediate adult supervision and visible to the rest of the congregation. One student recalled that when “out girls” (farmers’ daughters who lived “out” as “help” in village families) arrived at church early to commandeer the choice pews, a surreptitious battle of “pinching, pin pricking, and punching” ensued until the “school girls” could reclaim their turf the following week. Some seventy miles north in Massachusetts, male students from the Monson Academy were consigned to rear pews. But they nevertheless imagined themselves to be visible, at least to those who mattered most. Decades after leaving the academy, Charles Hammond could still summon to his mind’s eye the “dioramic procession of the fathers and magnates of the town” as they promenaded with their families past the scholars to seats at the very front of the church. The front seats of the old-fashioned, three-sided pews were occupied by the heads of households, who sat with their backs to the minister, facing their wives and children. But in Hammond’s telling, the notables kept their eyes “always directed toward us”—the academy students. As he “watched them in turn,” Hammond judged them to be exemplars of “personal gravity.”48 In this fantasy of mutual recognition, the “fathers and magnates” served as a mirror into the future, allowing Hammond to anticipate his own “personal gravity.”
Not all the fantasies spun by this sort of visibility were so uplifting, especially where young women were concerned. Poised on the brink of courtship, female students often figured as objects of sexual desire. This was certainly the case in Litchfield. There is no doubt that Sarah Pierce, a devout Christian and a shrewd politician, held her charges to the strictest standards of decorum. Yet the proximity of Tapping Reeve’s law school meant that the young women faced a steady stream of potential suitors, to say nothing of men who were less interested in securing wives than in testing their own appeal. The charged atmosphere that resulted reverberates through student diaries and letters and into late nineteenth-century memoirs of life in “olden times.” Recalling his arrival in Litchfield as a new law student, Edward Mansfield wrote that one of the “first objects that struck [his] eyes” was a procession of “school girls.” Some fifty years later, he could still recall the scene: He stood atop a hill, looking down onto a parade of “gaily dressed” ladies who passed beneath “lofty elms,” moving in time to the music of a “flute and a flageolet.” He was entranced. In subsequent months, he confessed, “one of [his] temptations” was to time his walk in order to “meet the girls, who … were often seen taking their daily walk.” This fascination with the town’s concentration of eligible “girls” was more than the nostalgia of an old man who found a wife among Pierce’s students. The “private journals” of John P. Brace, who taught at the school in the 1810s, are shot through with erotic tension. Frankly assessing his students’ charms, Brace vacillated between swaggering proclamations that were he not a teacher he could triumph as a beau and nagging fears that he would never measure up to the ladies’ exacting expectations. And a law student, George Younglove Cutler, filled up a journal with comments about the appearance and dress of Litchfield’s belles that he illustrated and then circulated among male and female friends. It was no secret among his intimates, then, that Miss Hart appeared “most horribly fashionable in her accouterments,” that Miss Talmadge was “certainly elegant,” and that when Miss Munson dressed with fewer ruffles, her shoulders appeared “infinitely more to advantage than common.”49
For women like the Misses Hart, Talmadge, and Munson, the politics of this highly eroticized visibility cut in multiple directions. Pleasure and power (if young men like Brace are to be believed) were countered by concerns about feminine reputation. Overexposure or improper exposure, especially before the wrong sort of spectator, could do permanent damage to a young woman’s social and moral standing, undermining her prospects for a good marriage and a secure place within the community. That was the lesson driven home to Caroline Chester in 1816, when she and several schoolmates trekked to Little Island on the Bantam River. Splashing from stone to stone to reach the island, the girls got wet and one fell into the river. “Some one” proposed that because the island was “so retired a place,” the girls could safely take off their shoes to wash their feet. The wettest also took off their “frocks” to dry across a bush. Alas, Little Island was not “so retired” as they hoped. After “spying two gentlemen” on a hill about “a quarter of a mile distant,” the young women threw on their clothes and beat a fast path home. Within twenty-four hours, exaggerated accounts of their indiscretion had reached Pierce. Chester and her friends managed to prove that they were “careless only & not improper” and that they had been “unjustly accused.” Still, for days afterward they were lectured about the uneasiness and unhappiness they had brought to the school. They were assured that some citizens continued to suspect them of the “most flagrant breach of propriety & delicacy.” They were exhorted “like Caesar’s wife [to] beware of being even suspected.” After hearing for the umpteenth time that she should never even “approach the boundary line of propriety,” Chester concluded that were she to “stay in Litchfield 100 years I would never, never walk to Little Island.”50
Figure 5. Page from the diary of George Younglove Cutler depicting Miss Munson, August 13, 1820. Litchfield Female Academy Collection, Litchfield Historical Society, Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library, 7 South Street, P.O. Box 385, Litchfield, CT 06759.
More striking than the story’s predictable moral—that a “woman’s fame is easily tarnished”—or the way that it maps feminine propriety onto the town’s geography, is the way that Chester’s narrative illuminates the importance of seeing and being seen. Spectatorship pervaded the academy experience. The anonymous men on the