Civil Society and the Public Woman

This essay examines the critical occasion of Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak (2006). It situates the book's major arguments in light of critical trends in both literary and historical studies, noting how the work registers important developments in the study of gender and culture in the early American republic. Especially important to the field is the book's central rubric of "civil society," which urges the interrogation of what we mean by the "public sphere" in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. The book similarly raises crucial questions about literary and cultural nationalism, particularly as it has been expressed by the role of the "republican" woman. In addition to posing challenges about the national contours of republican womanhood, the book also demonstrates the extent to which sentimental culture was not merely a "domestic" construction but a more widely circulating discourse that affected a wide range of cultural practices and languages. This idea particularly affects the way in which literary scholars conceive of the gendered borders of antebellum literary history.