Friends of the Owens-Thomas House (FOT)

Masculine Mentalities with Dr. Sandy Slater

The Friends of the Owens-Thomas House (FOT) is proud to present a fascinating lecture on masculinity in the low country during the early 19th century with Dr. Sandy Slater.

Elite Women’s Education at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century with Dr. Lizzie Rogers

The historic house, in town or country, was a perfect resource to a girl, or woman, wanting to learn or gain an education during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Libraries, collections, art, wealth, and people were all at their fingertips: but of course, how accessible were these things to women? This period saw a shift, through the intellectual movement of the enlightenment, in ideas and knowledge practices that led some philosophers, like John Locke, to effectively argue that women were held back by poor education, not by their own state of being. What could a woman learn? What should or shouldn’t she know? Through the words of women from this period, and published writers such as Jane Austen (from whose Pride and Prejudice the title quotation is taken), Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth, this talk explores some of the ways ideas about women’s education in this period were reshaped, how elite women learned and accessed knowledge, and their experiences of doing so.