The mirror of antiquity

"In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom."--BOOK JACKET.