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

In an 1892 letter to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lucy Stone recalled that they had both "learned to stand and speak" in the literary societies of their youth (quoted on 132). The coming together of literate women like Blackwell and Stone for mutual improvement was made possible by the proliferation of female academies and seminaries in the years between 1790 and 1860. As Mary Kelley notes, "the large majority of the leaders of post-Revolutionary and antebellum America's organized benevolence and social reform attended a female academy or seminary" (278). The education provided at these schools also helped the woman writer find her voice. "The correlation between being educated at a female academy or seminary and becoming a member of the nation's community of letters [was] equally strong" (278). In Learning to Stand and Speak, Kelley argues that these educational institutions contributed to "one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the course of the nation's history—the movement of women into public life" (1).

Kelley—Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan—uses women's own words to delineate the development of what she calls "gendered Republicanism." In addition to analyzing the letters, journals, diaries, and essays of students who attended academies and seminaries, Kelley looks at the subjects studied by women and the books they read—in class and outside. She also examines their later lives as revealed in both their personal correspondence and their published writings. Their involvement in literary societies, reading circles, and mutual improvement associations and their employment as teachers, writers, and editors illustrate the myriad ways educated women could shape public opinion and influence civil society.

Kelley takes issue with the simplistic dichotomy of separate spheres that confined women to the private world of home and domesticity. Women may have been absent from the legislatures of the new state and federal governments, but they nevertheless influenced public policy—and not just through their personal relationships with husbands and sons. Kelley prefers the phrase civil society to the term public sphere because it incorporates "any and all publics except those dedicated to the organized politics constituted in political parties and elections to local, state, and national office" (5). Women like Judith Sargent Murray, Annis Boudinot Stockton, and Sarah Josepha Hale were more than republican mothers: "Empowering themselves in their relationships with men other than their kin, they took for themselves the right to instruct all males in republican virtue" (25).

Given the racial and class divisions in the new republic, it is not surprising that many of Kelley's subjects are elite white women. But these were not the only individuals who benefited from the expansion of educational institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The "middling classes" sought social mobility and economic opportunities through education. This was possible because the curriculum evolved to reflect the expanded role education was expected to play in the new nation. Whereas higher education for women initially focused on female accomplishments, the academies and seminaries of the antebellum era increasingly offered a course of study similar to that provided by the men's colleges. Middle-class parents such as Lyman and Roxana Beecher "looked to education as an alternative endowment" for their daughters (4). As Emma Willard told graduates of Troy Female Seminary, education prepared them for lives of "distinguished usefulness" (32). Although their "usefulness" was primarily as teachers, women also became writers and editors. Free women of color in the North also sought an education that would allow them to influence civil society, and they formed their own literary societies where they "sharpened their arguments on racism and slavery and instilled in each other the self-confidence to publish those...