Product Description

Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the felt reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life.

By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181738 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Released on: 2008-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780807859216
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Ambitious and fascinating. . . . Women's voices are vibrantly present."
— Journal of American History

"The book's greatest strength is its archival depth and breadth. . . . Presents an impressive number of examples drawn from the experiences of women across seven decades and at least a dozen states. . . . An important resource for all historians of gender, education or print culture in early republic and antebellum America."
— Common-Place

"Elegant. . . . Kelley has drawn from a vast array of sources, crossing regional and racial lines, to produce a meticulous argument. Her story explains rather that valorizes."
— Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

"This superb book persuasively and gracefully makes the case that education . . . was the decisive factor propelling women's entrance into the public sphere during the nineteenth century. . . . Deserves the widest possible readership."
— The Historian

"[An] innovative and meticulously researched book."
— American Antiquarian Society Newsletter

Ambitious and fascinating.

—The Journal of American History

This book fills an important gap in the historiography.

—American Historical Review

A pathbreaking interpretation of the new and expanding spaces for female education between the Revolution and the Civil War.

—John Brooke, Ohio State University

The volume adds considerably to the historiography on American women, education, and politics.

—Journal of the Early Republic

From the Inside Flap
Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life.

About the Author
Mary Kelley is Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author, coauthor, or editor of six books, including Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America and The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere (both from the University of North Carolina Press).

Customer Reviews

An essential work on 19th century women's education
Learning to Stand and Speak is a sprawling book that addresses formal intellectual life in women's seminaries and literary societies as well as less formal intellectual life in sewing circles, correspondence, and the like. While Revolutionary Era republican motherhood envisioned a purely domestic, if politically significant, role for women, the "gendered republicanism" of the early republic also envisioned a role for women in the public sphere (p. 25). Kelley explicitly links women's intellectual life to voluntary societies and illustrates how reading and discussion circles promoted women's involvement in missionary work and abolition, and vice versa. Graduates of the new women's academies played prominent roles in this "organized benevolence" (p. 29). In another chapter, Kelley delineates how closely women's seminaries in the early republic resembled men's college--in curriculum, reading lists, size, cost, and even faculty. If anything, the women's academies offered more modern, and possibly more substantive, curricula than the men's colleges did. All in all, this is truly essential reading for anyone who is interested in the history of women's education and intellectual life in the nineteenth-century United States.