Article 11: Discourse, Education and Women’s Public Culture in the Port Royal Experiment: Interpreting the Life and Work of Laura Towne

The American Civil War is a period of particular importance to women’s history in the U.S., both in terms of the contributions that women made to movements and events and on their own social and political development. In antebellum anti-slavery organizations, in the war effort, and during Reconstruction women’s growing activism expanded women’s public and political cultures and, it has been argued, led to their campaign for the vote (Sklar 2006, 1999; Zaeske 2003). The cause of “uplifting” of the race “degraded” by slavery, for example, fueled by a religious and/or a more secular passion for human rights, took thousands of women to new places where, in community with each other, they learned and practiced the skills necessary for social change. These thousands included Northern white teachers who went South during the War and Reconstruction to join with free black and Southern white women in bringing the power of literacy to the freed people. Among them was Laura Matilda Towne of Philadelphia, founder of the Penn School on St. Helena Island in South Carolina in 1862.