What Would Elsie Do?: Educating Young Women About Moral and Academic Power in Martha Finley’s Nineteenth-Century Elsie Dinsmore Series

• Published in: Children's literature in education 2020-03, Vol.51 (1), p.95-109
• Main Author: D’Amico, LuElla
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Childrens Literature; Christianity; Education; Educational History; Home Schooling; Language and Literature; Language Education; Linguistics; Moral Values; Novels; Original Paper; Religion; Social Sciences; Sociology; Values Education; Womens Education
• ISSN: 0045-6713; 1573-1693
• DOI: 10.1007/s10583-018-9356-8

This article examines Martha Finley’s immensely popular, postbellum Elsie Dinsmore series. As a teacher, Finley was concerned with the best methodology to educate young American women, a topic much debated in the nineteenth century because of the proliferation of conduct books like the Elsie series and the simultaneous advent of common schools. Even today, homeschool societies and Christian publishing houses like Vision Forum Ministries have picked up and endorse the Elsie books as heralding good Christian values and solid academic reading for the young women within their folds, indicating that Finley’s proselytizing influence is not relegated to times past. Ultimately, this essay suggests that a fusion of moral and academic education became a source of subversive power for young, Evangelical women readers who learned how to cite confidently their scholarly authority because they felt they shared a unique relationship with God that superseded other oppressive structures impressed upon them.