“Women’s Entrepreneurial Lecturing in the Early National Period”

— Granville Ganter

“Granville Ganter turns to commercial popular lecturing and professional advancement in the early national period, long before Josiah Holbrook began his campaign for lyceum associations. Focusing primary attention on entrepreneurial white women such as Eliza Harriot O’Connor and Anne Laura Clarke, who used public lectures to attract clients for private schools, Ganter shows how these lecturers harmonized republican ideals for nationalist education with women’s business practices in civic and social domains. Illuminating the little-studied phenomenon of early commercial lecturing by people often overlooked in studies of lecture culture, Ganter disrupts assumptions about gender and entrepreneurship on the early American public stage” (pp. 16).

Selected Bibliography on Women and Public Lecturing

Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Eastman, Carolyn. A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Hoffman, Nancy. Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching. Women’s Lives, Women’s Work. Old Westbury: New York: Feminist Press; McGraw-Hill, 1981.

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Wright, Tom F., ed. The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

Zboray, Ronald J., and Zboray, Mary Saracino. Everyday Ideas : Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006.

Relevant People

Anne Laura Clarke

Eliza Harriot O’Connor

Maria Miller Stewart