Women who wrote women's history in antebellum American did so in a variety of venues, including literary societies, dramas, commencement addresses, and biographies. Whatever the venue, these historians looked to the past to claim intellectual equality in the present. The usable past they offered their readers meshed claims to intellectual equality with an ideology of republican womanhood in which learning was made integral to a woman's fulfillment of her role as a social and moral guardian of a newly independent America. Mediating the gender conventions of their century, historians such as Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Elizabeth Ellet celebrated learned women whose intellectual talents were joined with more conventional attributes of womanliness. The mediation performed by these historians both increased and circumscribed women's possibilities for self-determination.