Including Émigrés and Excluding Americans? The Philadelphia Female Seminary of Madame Marie Rivardi (aka Maria von Born)

This chapter discusses the role of Madame Rivardi’s Seminary for Young Women in Philadelphia as a force for creating exclusionary spaces for daughters of elite aristocrats, especially of European émigrés, amid a growing egalitarian moment in early American society. Founded in 1802, Madame Rivardi’s Seminary soon became a byword for excellence in the education of female students up until its spectacular financial collapse in 1814. The school’s focus lay on a principled European style of education, featuring an extensive acquisition of European languages and modelled on Francophone norms of social etiquette. Partly this focus stemmed from the overwhelming proportion of the school’s clientele—the émigré community of French expatriates who fled the French Revolution to Philadelphia throughout the 1790s—but also from the school’s eponymous founder Madame Marie Rivardi, an exile herself from the Habsburg Monarchy. She expected pupils to perfect noble traits and instigated various schemes designed to raise the profile of her students and her school. By educating scionesses of leading families in the United States, Rivardi reinforced the separation between social strata in early America, mixing domestic and foreign elites but demarcating them away from the general populace.