Dear Alma Mater: Women's Epistolary Education in the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 1873–1897

Anna Ticknor, a Boston Brahmin, founded America's first correspondence school. Hailing from across the nation, all students were women. The letters they exchanged with their instructors between 1873 and 1897 opened up flexible spaces of self-definition, encouragement, and disguise that came to mediate—and enable—a new kind of women's education in Victorian–era America.