Abstract

This article introduces the forum, "Women and Civil Society." Four scholars-Philip Gould, Jeanne Boydston, Rosemarie Zagarri, and John Brooke-respond to, critique, and expand on the arguments made in Mary Kelley's book, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education and Public Life in America's Republic (2006). The forum emerged from a roundtable held at the July 2006 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, in Montréal, Canada. Each essay considers such topics as women's education and intellectual aspirations, the antebellum female academies, the idea of "civil society," and antebellum reform and political culture.

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