Jefferson Female Academy in The Town (Location)

The "Academy" is the Jefferson institution of higher education for women that Linda Snopes attends for a year and a half after graduating from high school. The generic term for it would probably be 'a finishing school.' Gavin Stevens calls it an "anachronistic vacuum" (303): "one of the last of those gentle and stubbornly fading anachronisms called Miss So-and-So's or The So-and-So Female Academy or Institute whose curriculum included deportment and china-painting, which continue to dot the South though the rest of the United States knows them no more" (300). According to Gavin, the "dwindling few" young women who attend are taught that "not just American history but all history had not yet reached Christmas Day, 1865" - because the Civil War "was not done" (301).