“My Dear Child”
“With the earnest hope that you may obey these directions, and thus become wise and good while you are young.” (87)
Sprague’s Letters on Practical Subjects to a Daughter covers a range of topics starting from early childhood friendship to education, marriage, and death. All of his letters focus heavily on the role of religion in his daughter’s life. This facet of the letters is definitely attributed to the fact that Sprague was a minister of the Presbyterian Church. Each letter begins with a thorough explanation of what Sprague recommends (although it is more of an insistence) his daughter do throughout her life. Sprague wraps up each letter by connecting the expectations he has for his daughter’s life to how everything she does must ultimately be based on her faith and devotion to God. An important point to remember is that Sprague was a middle-class white male whose target audience was those who could afford his book. Issues of race were not a part of Sprague's rhetoric and he definitely had an audience limited to white, middle-class individuals like himself.
Sprague’s book perfectly illustrates the connections between morality and religion that pervaded reform movements of the first half of the 19th century. Rules of etiquette were an important way to perpetuate “proper morals” in society and Sprague’s book shows that these morals were ultimately drawn based on religious expectations. Sprague’s letters also show how the various branches of reform movements influenced each other. In particular, Sprague encouraged his daughter to pursue education and believed in the need for both sexes to “cultivate their minds.” Despite this progressive idea in line with educational reforms of the time, Sprague still limited his daughter’s education to what was appropriate for a woman to learn – the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and a full understanding of “home economics,” a popular new course of studies for women that taught them how to be proper housewives.[1] Sprague also restricted his daughter’s education by reiterating throughout his book about the importance of education as a way to refine the gifts God bestowed upon her so that she could then use them in the name of his glory, not as a way to advance herself through a career.[2] Consequently, although Sprague embraced educational reform to include females, it was within the limits of the Christian religion, a fact that his letters to his daughter demonstrate.
[1] Ruskin Teeter, The Opening up of American Education (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 1983), 123.
[2] William B. Sprague, Letters on Practical Subjects to a Daughter (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1834), 31.