Stoicism and the Servants: Philosophy and the Periodical Press

[...]I will show how the Stoic mandate to bear and forebear was enforced unequally across boundaries of class and race and could paradoxically reinforce social hierarchies even as its precepts emphasized the equality of master and servant. "12 This emphasis on women's innate capacity for logical thought should not be taken as an argument that domestic periodicals support the "assumption that it is more useful for girls to learn domestic economy than to have a formal education," as Boardman claims.13 The article directly challenges the broader cultural assumption that education made women unfit for domestic duties: "A pair of spectacles and a credit for Greek have driven away many young wooers before now, and made old maids of women fitted to shine in society, to make their husbands renowned, and help them by their accomplishments, and to bring up wise and clever children? What would they think if they saw the poor woman "bridled," the knife-point thrust into her mouth, the iron hoop locked tight round her jaws, the cross bands of iron brought over her head and clasped behind, her arms pinioned, a ring and chain attached to the brank, and thus led or driven from the market-place, through all the principal streets of the town, for an hour or two, and then brought back bleeding to her loving(!) husband? Patricia Okker's scholarship on the "sisterly editorial voice" of women's periodicals in the United States is relevant here.54 While Okker examines the "multivocality" of the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book in order to prove the "polyphonic nature of nineteenth-century women's magazines," I see unity, if not uniformity, in Hale's choice of content, as well as Beeton's.55 Hale's publication offered her readers an education in the values of republican motherhood, drawing on the principles of classical philosophy.