Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of two private Georgia schools that sought to prepare young women post-Reconstruction South: Spelman Seminary of Atlanta, educating African American women and girls, and Lucy Cobb Institute, established for young white elite women in Athens. Examining schools for girls run and staffed by women allows us to see how women themselves developed new ideas about women’s responsibilities and duties for their society and their race in the changed circumstances of the New South. It argues that concerns about female sexuality and respectability united the two schools, despite their very different interpretations of what would constitute a desirable New South.