118 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Educational opportunities for young women exploded
during the early republic. While girls had routinely
been educated in their homes before 1800, thereafter
families began to enroll them in schools. Hundreds
of female academies appeared to meet this demand,
ranging from small and temporary enterprises to
more stable institutions that endure to this day.
Girls were often exposed to the same subjects as
boys, though with interesting variations. Geography
was considered essential for both sexes, but for girls
it often included extensive map-drawing exercises.
From 1790 to the 1830s, thousands of students
drew, painted, and stitched maps as part of their
education. Most common were maps of the nation
and its capital, shown on pages 100 and 106. Some
of these were copied and traced, while others were
drawn freehand, using only the grid of longitude
and latitude as guides. While most reflect care and
precision—with carefully composed borders and
river systems—others bear the marks of more
artistic freedom.
Maps and geography were considered particularly
appropriate material for girls, a “useful” pathway to
literacy and citizenship that also honed traditional
feminine skills of “accomplishment” such as painting
or needlework. As John Pinkerton wrote in 1818 in the
preface to his own atlas, “[Geography] is a study so
universally instructive and pleasing that it has, for
nearly a century, been taught even to females.” Sarah
Pierce, founder of the Litchfield Female Academy in
Connecticut, stressed geography and map drawing
as a way to strengthen “principles of association” and
“readiness of memory.” For young girls in the new
republic, the ability to create a map of the nation and
the world was a mark of one’s education.
This page is taken from the penmanship journal
of Catharine Cook, who attended a well-established
school for girls in Vermont. Like her classmates,
Cook was taught to use penmanship as a way
to practice other subjects: across several pages
she wrote out lessons in history, geography, and
astronomy with elaborate calligraphy. The journal
concluded with a series of hand-drawn maps: first
the world, then the nation shown here, and finally
the individual states.
Cook’s map of the United States is representative
of an exercise that was undertaken in hundreds of
schools across the country. She took great care to
reproduce the formal elements of a map, such as the
"neatline" around the edge alongside the measures
of longitude and latitude. The elaborate cartouche
at lower right reflects Cook’s attention to calligraphy
and illustration, both of which were integral to the
curriculum. State names are drawn in a separate
style of calligraphy, while meticulous application of
color demarcates boundaries. Together, these details
reveal the sustained attention that these projects
required, no doubt as a way to occupy the long school
days that developed in the nineteenth century. These
maps took months to complete, and many were then
publicly evaluated in formal competitions held at the
end of the school year. The charming misspellings
on Cook’s map—of Pennsylvania, Lake Superior,
Louisiana, and Mississippi—remind us that behind
these projects were individual learners often just
entering their teenage years.
This map—like so many others—also reflects
something deeper at work in early nineteenth-century
education. By drawing their country, these students
were making the nation real, inscribing its abstract
boundaries and administrative units and visualizing
the topography and river systems of distant regions
that most would never see firsthand. In the process,
young girls and boys connected themselves to their
fellow citizens, rendering the nation as a coherent
and stable entity. Such an exercise was especially
relevant in the 1810s, when the War of 1812 tested—
and then vindicated—American independence.
Map drawing was more commonly taught to girls
than boys in this era. Catherine Beecher, founder
of the Hartford Female Academy, recalled (less
than fondly) the emphasis on map drawing and
artistic accomplishment in her own education. Many
young girls who had been exposed to map work in
British and American academies went on to become
teachers to support themselves, and brought these
exercises with them into an ever growing network of
schools around the country. The practice declined
by the 1840s, when inexpensive wall maps, atlases,
and other cartographic materials flooded the market
and made it less necessary for students to create
their own learning materials. Immensely charming
artifacts, these maps also reveal the daily experience
of the first generation of girls to be formally
educated in the new nation.A SCHOOLGIRL MAPS HER COUNTRY
“A Map of the United States by
Catharine M. Cook,” 1818