1. Annual Report of the Regents, 1851. My assessments of academy student enrollments and the number and kind of academies in operation state-wide are drawn from an analysis of data drawn from the Report of the Regents at five year intervals from 1835 to 1890.
2. The diarist Eli Rogers, discussed above, pursue this career pattern. See also Scott, “Troy Female Seminary;” Allmendinger, “Mt. Holyoke,” Kerns, “Antebellum Higher Education,” and Polly Welts Kauffman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984): 230–253.
3. Vinvoskis “Have We Underestimated…?,“ 567.
4. “Diary of Frances Connor Smith [Wells],” 1831–37. Box 10, William H. Emerson Family papers, 1758–1953, University of Rochester Library, Special Collections.
5. Stevenson Louise L. The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991): 30–47; quotations from p.33. Joan Jacobs Brumberg also refers to a culture of concern with character development in the diaries of 19th century young women in her study of female adolescence. Unfortunately for us, however, her focus on how this culture changed in the twentieth century led her to provide few quotations or specific references from the earlier period, even though she apparently did collect the diaries that would have allowed her to do so. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vantage, 1998).