Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, and: Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (review)

Although the ideology of separate spheres dominated scholarship on women’s culture for years, publications such as the No More Separate Spheres! anthology edited by Cathy N. Davidson (and based on a special issue of American Literature) marked a shift echoed in numerous studies since then. Both Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak and Catherine Kerrison’s Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South share an affiliation with such work, showing that American women in earlier eras were not, in fact, consigned solely to domestic spaces and exiled entirely from engagement in public life. Much of this scholarship has focused on women’s efforts to write for publication, but Kerrison’s and Kelley’s new books emphasize women’s educational experiences as a key to understanding the evolution of gender roles in US culture.

One hallmark of both these fine books is their effort to mine archival sources to uncover the literacy practices of American women from earlier eras. (This commitment to recovery work is reflected in the striking illustrations in both texts, though Kelley’s does boast a much more extensive collection of images.) Viewing literacy as including women’s personal writing and reading, as well as their use of oral skills in social settings, Kelley and Kerrison each regard the complex culture of women’s pre- and post-Revolutionary literacy practices as a rich terrain for study. Both books also share the compelling strategy of combining treatment of well-recognized figures (e.g., Fanny Fern [Sara Parton] and Harriet Beecher Stowe for Kelley; Susanna Rowson for Kerrison) with vivid accounts of less familiar women. Accordingly, Kelley offers a case study of Harriet Burleigh Janes, whose authorial output progressed from homemade miniature books to submissions for a “Children’s Corner” feature in a Bostonbased periodical to regular stories for Harry Hazel’s Yankee Blade and other publications (60–64). Similarly, Kerrison extends an inventory of the earlyeighteenth- century Virginia library proudly displayed by William Byrd II to include an account of his moves to restrict his wife Lucy’s reading; Kerrison then counters that vignette with a discussion of the long-time book collector Lady Jean Skipwith, whose extensive purchases about one hundred years later were facilitated by the increased availability of print text—but also by her many years living as a widow of independent means. Learning to Stand and Speak and Claiming the Pen share a focus on relatively privileged white women, an emphasis that is consistent with archival collections having a far larger record of literacy practices from this group than from others whose access to reading and writing has historically been even more constrained. Nonetheless, devoting more attention to the causes behind these gaps, to their lingering effects, and to the sources that are available from women of different race and class backgrounds could have strengthened both of these very worthwhile studies.

Despite their similar methodologies and themes, these two nuanced studies differ in ways allowing each to make a distinctive contribution. One key difference is the time periods addressed: Kerrison concentrates on the eighteenth century (though she dips back into early colonial days occasionally and ends with a quick survey of more recent developments); Kelley focuses on the decades after the American Revolution through the pre-Civil War years. Another important difference—and one clearly related to their contrasting chronological frames— is the venues for learning each scholar chooses to explore. For Kerrison, informal learning sites and practices are crucial. To recover the learning experiences of eighteenth-century southern women banned from the schooling open to young men, she argues...