- Seeing in the title of Congressman Paul Ryan’s economic plan for cutting the deficit an allusion to an essay by Benjamin Franklin, Jill Lepore (The New York Times, 23-Apr-2011) illustrates the difference between the education of Franklin and his favorite sister, Jane. By extension, she describes the sharp contrast between the education of boys and girls in colonial America.
Jill Lepore on Franklin’s Sister, Jane
Mocking idleness and turning labor [in the North] into a badge of honor made the South, with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery, seem even more anomalous than it had been at the time of the Revolution, thus aggravating the growing sectional split in the country. Many Southern aristocrats began emphasizing their cavalier status in contrast to the money-grubbing northern Yankees. They were fond of saying that they were real gentlemen, a rare thing in America.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)