JAMES W. VINING
BEN A. SMITH

Susanna Haswell Rowson was so
multitalented and her career so
multifaceted on both sides of the
Atlantic Ocean that a number of identi-
fying occupations and titles could
appropriately follow the colon in the
title of this article. They include English
novelist, English poet and lyricist, Eng-
lish actress, American novelist, Ameri-
can actress, American poet and lyricist,
pioneer American feminist, American
educator, and American geographer. In
the history of the arts in America,
Susanna Rowson is best known as a
novelist, but she preferred to think of
herself--even while in the process of
writing novels--as an educator. Conse-
quently, we chose "early American
geography educator" to describe her.

Because this article is for social stud-
ies educators, we emphasize Rowson's
contributions to early American educa-
tion and geography. As professional
geography educators, we place particu-
lar emphasis on her contributions to
early American geography. Let us then
briefly consider geography's place in
society and education during her time.

Holt-Jensen ( 1980 ) devoted consider-
able space to the origins of geography,
discussing Ptolemy, Kant, Ritter, Dar-
win, Hartshorne, and others, but neither
a time nor an individual was identified
as the beginning of geography. It does
appear that geography as a tool
employed by people goes well back into
antiquity, with numerous opinions about
the origins of geography as a science
and as a profession. Ritter may have
been the first professional geographer;
"In 1820 he was established as the first
professor of geography in Berlin" (17).

Prior to 1820, geographers were peo-
ple who took on the title, performed the
activities, or wrote books relating to
geography. None of them was trained to
be a geographer. Brown ( 1941 ) identi-
fied Jedidiah Morse as the Father of
American Geography. Morse, a clergy-
man, was, like many of his contempo-
raries, a writer of a variety of books.
Thus Rowson taught geography and
published geography textbooks before
geography was an established disci-
pline. Geography did not become a dis-
cipline, partly because of an insufficient
body of literature on the subject, until
the demise of Alexander von Humboldt
and Karl Ritter in 1859 and Samuel G. Goodrich
in 1860 ( Smith and Vining
1989).

Susanna Haswell was born in 1762 in
Portsmouth, England, to Susanna Mus-
grave Haswell and William Haswell. Her
mother died ten days after her birth, and
her father, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy,
was shipped off to Massachusetts soon
thereafter, leaving the little girl in the
care of a nurse. In 1765, William
Haswell married an American woman,
Rachel Woodward, and two years later
returned to England to bring his daughter
to Massachusetts. The transAtlantic voy-
age of five-year-old Susanna, accompa-
nied by her father and nurse, was beset
by stormy seas, near starvation, and a
near shipwreck in Boston Harbor. A
quarter-century later, Susanna Rowson
incorporated the details of this misadven-
turous voyage into one of her novels.

The Haswells settled on the Nantasket
Peninsula, southeast of Boston Harbor.
Lieutenant Haswell was stationed at
Hull, the British naval base and the

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