The Peabody sisters of Massachusetts -- Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne -- were icons of their time: educated women, education pioneers, reformers and Massachusetts religious liberals. Each played a role in the cultural, religious and philosophical Transcendentalist movement.
Their mother, Elizabeth or Eliza Palmer, was a strong influence in their lives. In the generation after the Revolutionary War, especially in Massachusetts (which had approximately one quarter of the U.S. population at the time), one role that women took quite seriously was as the educators of the next generation: Republican Motherhood. These women helped lay the groundwork, through their own example and, for some, through educating their daughters, for another generation of women who took on different challenges than they did, broadening their scope to more public roles in education, reform, and professions.
Eliza Palmer's Story
Her family had long roots in Boston. Eliza's parents, Joseph Pearse Palmer and Elizabeth Hunt, met while he was a student at Harvard. She was then fourteen, and he encouraged her cultural and intellectual development. When he graduated in 1771, the couple eloped and then moved to Boston, where he managed warehouses on the harbor for his father and owned some himself. He became one of the participants in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. When the British troops destroyed warehouses and their contents in revenge, he moved his wife and growing family to his wife's home town of Watertown. He also participated in the Battle of Lexington (1775).
Joseph Pearse Palmer and his father, Joseph Palmer, both fought with the Continental Army, the elder as a General and the younger as an aide to his father and as a Quartermaster General. During the war, Elizabeth moved with daughters Mary and Eliza to her parents' home in Germantown; Eliza later remembered this time as one of relative calm and happiness for them.
General Palmer, the father, had gone into debt to support the Revolution, and when he could not recover, the holder of the note, John Hancock, foreclosed. Joseph Pearce Palmer was also impoverished by the war, and tried running a store, a boardinghouse, and traveling to work in the lumber business.
Betrayal?
While her husband was away, Elizabeth operated the boardinghouse. A boarder with the family, Royall Tyler, a future Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a playwright, had been engaged to a daughter of John and Abigail Adams, an engagement broken off by her parents because of concern about his character. When the family could not pay some creditors, he paid the debt, probably keeping them from prison. He eventually married Mary, Eliza's sister.
Later, Eliza anonymously published a story, "Seduction," which was a thinly-disguised story (with some confirmation from other family members) about Royall Tyler's friendship with her father, seduction of her mother, Elizabeth, in his absence, and then Tyler's courtship of and elopement with Eliza's sister, Mary. Two younger sisters, Sophia and Catherine, had family secrets around their true parentage: Sophia was born at a time when Joseph was unlikely to have been the father, as he was traveling, and Catherine's parentage was mysterious: it was rumored that neither Joseph nor Elizabeth were her real parents. (Catherine's son founded Putnam and Sons, an American publishing house.)
Eliza was also horrified that, when Tyler first married her sister Mary, he would do so only as an extra-legal "private" marriage, in order to keep the news from his family. He did not acknowledge Mary publicly as his wife nor take her home to his family in Vermont until she was pregnant with their second child.
Independence
After Joseph died in a construction accident, and Tyler briefly returned to live with the family, leaving Mary and their children in Vermont, Eliza went to live with her father's aunt, Mary Cranch, in Quincy. There, she tried to gain some financial independence. After a brief time as a shopgirl and then an outbreak of yellow fever, Eliza went to work for another distant relative, Elizabeth Shaw Peabody, who was also the sister of Abigail Adams, and was married to Stephen Peabody, a minister and school administrator in New Hampshire. Eliza helped out at home, and though she was drawn to tutoring student boarders, the family discouraged that activity.
She was also drawn to one of the academy's instructors, a distant relative of Stephen's named Nathaniel Peabody (born 1774). Because he was the son of a farmer, Elizabeth and Stephen Peabody discouraged his relationship with their relative, Eliza Palmer -- though Eliza was working as household help, the Peabodys thought him below her social position.
Both Eliza and Nathaniel accepted positions at a school in Andover, Massachusetts, and they married in 1802. In 1804, they moved to Billerica.
Eliza and Nathaniel's Family
About the time of the birth of their first child, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, while they were living in Billerica, Massachusetts, Eliza pushed her husband to become a doctor, while she ran a school to supplement the family income. The family moved to Cambridge so that he could continue studying medicine, and Eliza opened another school. Their second child, Mary Tyler Peabody, was born there in 1806, and then the family moved to Lynn in 1806 and Salem in 1808, where another five children were born, starting with Sophia Amelia Peabody.
Nathaniel, tired of the medical profession, became, instead, a dentist. Eliza was committed to a strong education for all their children, and was often running a school, in which the daughters, as they grew older, assisted.
She made sure her daughters as well as her sons not only learned to read and write, and studied literature, but also studied theology and philosophy.
Eliza's family had attended King's Chapel in Boston when James Freeman (1759 - 1835) was minister -- the first American minister to use the name Unitarian for himself. An early Unitarian, Eliza retained some of the Calvinist ideas about suffering and wickedness, and each of the daughters reacted differently to that: Elizabeth decided to improve the world; Mary held less stringent views than her mother; and Sophia experienced illness and headaches and saw those as sufferings she was meant to endure.
Nathaniel taught Latin to his children, including his daughters. Elizabeth, of the children, took to languages, and learned in her lifetime ten different languages.
But it was largely Eliza Palmer Peabody who provided the education and motivation to her daughters to carry out their roles in the world. She ran her school, including for her own children, with an emphasis on bringing out the unique excellence in every student, girls included.
Through their mother's influence, each of the sisters read widely and had a broad range of interests. Elizabeth launched her own career in education by assisting in her mother's school. Mary took her place when Elizabeth left. Sophia developed her talent in painting and drawing during these years.
In 1853, the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who never married, would return home to nurse her mother in her final illness.
Peabody Children
- Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: May 16, 1804 - January 3, 1894
- Mary Tyler Peabody Mann: November 16, 1807 - February 11, 1887
- Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne: September 21, 1809 - February 26, 1871
- Nathaniel Peabody: born 1811
- George Peabody: born 1813
- Wellington Peabody: born 1815
- Catherine Peabody: (died in infancy)
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