Civilizing Selves: Public Structures and Private Lives in Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak

"This essay is a reflection on Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic, which argues that women's private seminary and academy education was critical to the formation the a critical public discourse in the early republic and to women's participation in that discourse. The present essay seeks to extend and enlarge that analysis by focusing on two of Kelley's key concepts: "civil society" and "self-fashioning." The essay suggests that the "civil society" of the early American republic was far larger, more heterogeneous, and messier than most work on the subject acknowledges, that it included individuals and groups with tenuous positions in the new republic as well as members of the middling and elite classes. The struggle of white bourgeois women to become active participants in the making of public opinion was not merely a process of creating new gender identities, Boydston argues, but also of strengthening the bourgeois values of the societies they embraced against other groups vying for power in the making of a critical public arena.