Additionally, historians studied the interior lives of female students: the community of women within the schools, and gender relationships as women became more active in the public sphere and transformed their social identities. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz finds that the designs of early female institutions consciously intended them as a place and space for the exclusive use of women. Margaret Nash identifies class and race as more important than gender in the construction of such educational institutions, as individuals who saw themselves as members of a newly emerging ‘middling class” struggled for self-definition, making education an emblem of class status. Mary Kelly argues that with a curriculum that often matched the course of study at male colleges, women’s liberal learning cultivated one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation’s history: the movement of women into public life. Christie Anne Farnham questions the paradox of offering women an education explicitly designed to be equivalent to that of …show more content…
The church sought out healthy, virtuous environments in the founding of its schools in its desire to provide male students for theological training, and female students for training as minister’s wives and teachers. Although the church had long supported the ideal of an educated ministry and Sunday Schools for the purpose of the virtuous education of children, it was not until 1851 that a “Plea for Female Education” was made. Richard W. Solberg examines the promotion of education by early German settlers in Pennsylvania and the difficulties of establishing both male and female Lutheran institutions of higher learning as they moved south into the Carolinas, while Raymond M. Bost and Jeff L. Norris consider the development of the North Carolina Synod and follow its path to educate the daughters of the church in the