Kelley, Mark. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Summary[]

This book examines the movement of women into public life during the post-revolutionary/antebellum period and looks at the impact this transformation had on individual and social identities. It centralizes the role of schooling at female academies and seminaries in mediating this process and argues that education was far more expansive and radical (than previously recognized) and transformed a generation of women. Kelley argues that educated (elite) women created social identities as learned women that signaled their entrance into civil society, their increased influence on public opinion, and an expanded (though gendered) role in the republic. As writers, editors, teachers and reformers, women entered the “public sphere” or the social space between the institutions of family life and the nation-state and challenged normative binaries (private/public, male/female) and through voluntary organizations (literary societies) women increased their claim to a public voice and intellectual authority. In schools, literary societies, and other organizations, “women addressed the larger meanings of knowledge… practiced the art of persuasive self presentation, and instructed themselves in the values and vocabularies of civil society.” (14) These women thus created and configured what Kelley calls a “gendered republicanism.”