By Peter F. Stevens

In June 1804, a group of well-dressed young ladies in long skirts and bonnets assembled at the corner of Adams and East Streets and filed along a tree-lined walk and into a stately new house. They had not gathered for a tea or social, but for the beginning of their studies at a brand new school &emdash; Mrs. Saunders's and Miss Beach's Academy for Girls.

The Academy offered daughters of genteel families a site where the course of study was tailored to develop students into refined and poised young women. For most local families, however, the "town," or public, schools would have to do. The Academy for Girls was a private institution, and tuition well beyond most people's means was required for entry along the manicured walkway and inside the broad-windowed house, with its two huge fireplaces and chimneys. Unlike today, when September kicks off school sessions, June was the month when Dorchester's girls often found themselves perched behind desks.

Throughout Dorchester of 1804, the Town Meeting had footed the bill &emdash; gladly so &emdash; for public schools "established at Squantum, Dorchester Neck, on the 'upper country road,' on the lower road, and in the 'south end of town.'" But the Dorchester schools catered mainly to the education of boys, which was the state of affairs across New England. A historian writes: "In these modern days we are apt to forget the inferior position formerly held by women; yet it is a fact that until 1784 girls were not considered worthy [of] the same privileges allowed the boys as regards education."

Shifting attitudes toward children's education a bit, the Town Meeting voted in the late 18th century "that such Girls as can read in a Psalter be allowed to go to the Grammar School from the first Day of June to the first Day of October." Previously, many Dorchester girls had received any education at home, learning the essentials: reading, writing, basic numbers, and "the Catechism."

Local girls from wealthy families sometimes attended "Dame Schools" in and around Boston, where their education consisted of reading, spelling, sewing, embroidery, and stitching of samplers. Still, reflecting the manners and mores of the era, "writing, arithmetic, grammar, and geography were considered entirely superfluous to the female mind."

Near the end of the 18th century, Dorchester families' increasing push for better education of girls led the Town Meeting to pass a measure that "the grammar schools be open for girls six months in the summer" (the term ended in November). But many locals were not yet ready to embrace such a "radical" notion as an enhanced education for girls: the town's leaders, acceding to pressure from a cadre of residents, reevaluated the just-passed measure and, in the case of one "grammar school near the meeting-house," stated that "no girls be allowed to go to it."

In 1797, civic leaders allocated funds to establish four schools for girls "to be kept during the summer season," but Dorchester's leading families preferred to send their daughters to private schools, "select schools for young women conducted by persons of their own sex." Mrs. Saunders and Miss Beach offered just that when they opened the doors of their Academy for Girls in June 1804.

Saunders and Beach embodied the traditions of the private school "where favored girls could be taught the rudiments of an education," the pair of Dorchester schoolmistresses catering to young ladies "who have a mind to become acquainted with French, English, arithmetic, penmanship or epistolary writing." Of course, Saunders and Beach emphasized the importance of and instruction in "needlework" for their students, instructing the girls in sewing and stitching techniques "in the most genteel and elegant taste." Of key importance to the parents who entrusted their daughters to the tutelage of Saunders and Beach was that at the Academy for Girls, "propriety and good manners were treated as matters of careful attention, not less than the fundmental morals." The two teachers offered a "tone and select companionship for parents who had daughters to bring out or push forward in society."

As in all of Dorchester's schools, public or private, Mrs. Saunders's and Miss Beach's young ladies received daily instruction in "the principles of Religion, as well as the various branches of human literature, suitably adapted to their age and standing." The books the girls pored over included such classic texts as Colburn's and Daboll's Arithmetic, Woodbridge's Geography and Atlas, Worcester's Friend of Youth, Lee's Spelling Book, Leavitt's Reading Lessons, and Walker's Dictionary.

Another work that was a key element at the Academy for Girls was Noah Webster's famed Spelling Book. According to a local historian, "it is said that two-thirds of the inhabitants of the United States at that time received the rudiments of their education from this book; and the good people of Dorchester proudly stood on the side of the majority."

By 1832, another private school &emdash; the Dorchester Academy &emdash; had begun to draw both the daughters and sons of the town's most prominent families. William Dana Orcutt notes: "In the catalogue for that year are the names of many of Dorchester's most respected men and women." Some of the mothers of those students had matriculated at Mrs. Saunders's and Miss Beach's Academy for Girls, eclipsed by Dorchester Academy and other private schools, as well as by the excellent public school system evolving in the town throughout the 19th century.

Today, Mrs. Saunders's and Miss Beach's Academy for Girls is a historical footnote. In the early 19th Century, however, as the sweet notes of a pianoforte wafted from the school's windows, along with the strains of youthful voices conversing in French, Dorchester's most fortunate girls learned "everything [they] would need to know as an adult."