In their search for the ideological origins of the women's rights movement, historians have already defined rather clearly two distinct ideas. The first Linda Kerber has labeled “the ideology of the Republican mother,” a cluster of attitudes popular in the years after the American Revolution that emphasized the importance of mothers being educated in order to educate their children. These ideas were argued persuasively by both male and female writers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, most eloquently by Judith Sargeant Murray, the New England essayist who stressed the need for female education in the 1790s. By the 1820s, a second ideology was taking form, one that I would like to label “the ideology of the teaching daughters,” in which writers argued the benefits of employing women as teachers.