Date of Award

2009

Degree Type

Dissertation

Department

Education and Human Services

First Advisor

Carl, James

Subject Headings

Miss Augusta Mittleberger's School for Girls (Cleveland, Ohio), Women -- Education -- Ohio -- Cleveland -- History -- 19th century, Women -- Education -- Ohio -- Cleveland -- History -- 20th century, Women -- Ohio -- Cleveland -- Social conditions -- 19th century, Women -- Ohio -- Cleveland -- Social conditions -- 20th century, Girls' schools -- Ohio -- Cleveland -- History, Women's education, American Victorian school journalism, Augusta Mittleberger

Abstract

Augusta Mittleberger (1845-1915) was a prominent educator and owner/director of the Miss Mittleberger School for Girls (1875-1908) in Cleveland in the American Victorian period, defined here as 1876-1915. Using the journalism of Mittleberger's students, this dissertation provides a social and educational profile of upper middle and upper class girls within Cleveland's Victorian sociocultural context, with the eye to understanding the impact of Mittleberger's entrepreneurship, the lives of Victorian girls, the opportunities for women, and the school's urban context. This study looked for evidence of whether these girls, kindergarten-college preparatory, were aware of their social position, whether they exercised its privilege and proclivities as described by the tenets of studies on American class, and how their school experiences impacted their futures as women in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. This study provides evidence that Mittleberger's use of contemporary methods and advanced curriculum transitioned many of her students to higher education and careers, taking them beyond the traditional roles of their mothers - marriage and motherhood, Protestant benevolent work, and family philanthropy. Sources for profiling this private school, set in one of the most elite, powerful, Protestant enclaves of the late 1800's, include Cleveland newspapers, biographies, private papers, church and business records, city directories, county records, census records, maps, atlases, Gilded Age histories, education histories, Cleveland histories, and school records - particularly the issues of the school's journl/newspaper, The Interlude, written by the articulate students themselves

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