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Looking for emotion, struggle, determination, and
accomplishment? They’re all there in Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters, a
fascinating look at the lives of three women who helped light up American
culture in the early history of our Republic. Pulling information from newly discovered letters and
diaries, Marshall tells us about Sophia, Mary, and Elizabeth Peabody, our
equivalent of England’s storied Brontë sisters. The Peabody
women, who accomplished much in their own right, were associated with and
shaped some of the leading luminaries of American literature, such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who led the Transcendental movement and literary culture by
the end of the 1830s. The sisters traded ideas with these thinkers and
published and promoted their works. They also worked together to establish
Boston schools and teach in them — Elizabeth, in particular, is
credited with popularizing kindergarten education in the United States.
They participated in developing new approaches to schooling and chronicled
this in publications that are little known today. Marshall has changed
that. Letters and diaries pull the reader into the emotions
and lives of the sisters. Marshall found one diary never before interpreted
and drew heavily from others. To flesh out her story, she includes artwork,
newly discovered letters, and multiple publications, exploring the social
web and sometime community that grew up around the Peabodys in the 1820s
and ’30s. Marshall has not written a biography of individuals
but instead a history through the women’s careers and youthful and
adult years. Mary (1806-1887) became a strident reformer and married Horace
Mann. Sophia (1809-1871) grew into an artist of note when few women were
able to gain international recognition. Her creativity was joined with that
of Nathaniel Hawthorne when Sophia married the author in 1842. Elizabeth
(1804-1894), the most influential, never married. She held her own to
converse with and
influence the emerging philosophies of Transcendentalism through Emerson,
William Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott. She eventually opened a
bookstore that gathered thinkers, published the well-known
transcendentalist journal The Dial, and offered a place for her and Margaret Fuller’s
“Conversations with Women.”
Each sister succeeded in cultivating her own public
identity, but the three combined forces to offer new perspectives on art,
education, and philosophy. The Peabody Sisters illuminates an important part of our nation’s
history, revealing just how critical and influential women were, from the
very beginning.
Deborah Kuhn McGregor teaches history and
women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. She is
the author of From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology.
She reminds us that March is Women’s History
Month.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2007.
