Benjamin Rush's 'Rethinking Republican Mother'

Education for women in the 19th century was for the most part upper classes’ girls’ “boarding schools advertised instruction in “Polite Education” or gentility. These boarding schools were attending by girls who could afford to be sent to them to learn how to be apart of the higher societies. Benjamin Rush’s piece that the idea that education for women makes better, more moral, and more education, republican sons. Education for women gives women the opportunity to teach their sons’ how to be a better man in the 1787 American society. Benjamin Rush makes an argument for women’s education on the basis that this educated women will bring more educated son’s into this world, we can see this when we look at the context that this piece is written from, the idea of the “Republican Mother”, and the language that Rush uses.
In the 19th century around the turn in the American Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment was also in affect . People were having more thoughts about education in general and about women having
Margaret Nash argues in “Rethinking Republican Motherhood” that a “Republic Mother”, coined by Laura Kerber, who is a mother that during the revolution was at home taking care of the business or farm, etc. while her husband was away fighting and after the men came home there was no going back to just being a domestic house wife. The “Republic Mother” ”offered a way to combine domesticity with political and civic roles”. The “Republic Mother” fits into Rush’s argument perfectly, “The influence of female education would be still more extensive and useful in domestic life … Children would discover the marks of maternal prudent and wisdom in every station of life …”. Rush believed that female education would bring forth a new “Republic Mother” who would be able to use her education for domestic life and educate her children, mostly sons, with much more gentility then her family had for