Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic
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.

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.
1118476207
Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic
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.

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.
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Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic

Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic

by Mary Kelley
Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic

Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic

by Mary Kelley

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Overview

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.

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

ISBN-13: 9780807859216
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
Publication date: 09/01/2008
Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Edition description: 1
Pages: 312
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

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, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere, and The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments     vii
List of Illustrations     xiii
Introduction     1
You Will Arrive at Distinguished Usefulness: The Grounds for Women's Entry into Public Life     16
The Need of Their Genius: The Rights and Obligations of Schooling     34
Female Academies Are Everywhere Establishing: Curriculum and Pedagogy     66
Meeting in This Social Way to Search for Truth: Literary Societies, Reading Circles, and Mutual Improvement Associations     112
The Privilege of Reading: Women, Books, and Self-Imagining     154
Whether to Make Her Surname More or Adams: Women Writing Women's History     191
The Mind Is, in a Sense, Its Own Home: Gendered Republicanism as Lived Experience     245
Epilogue     275
Index     281

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Kelley does a splendid job of documenting the means, formal and informal, through which women of the middle and upper classes prepared themselves to enter the civic life of the new nation. Synthesizing the scholarship on women in the early Republic with a wealth of archival material, she paints a rich portrait of women's minds on the move.—Joan Hedrick, Trinity College

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