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

Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak recovers a generation of academy-schooled learned women of the early republic from the relative obscurity that subsequently befell them at historians’ hands. Too many of these writers, most of whom were men, apparently saw the very idea of an intellectual woman as incongruous, if not oxymoronic, for such women seldom appear in their publications, and if they do, they have little force and even less consequence. Ironically, more recent historians of American women unwittingly compounded the oversight by overemphasizing the limiting impact of antebellum woman’s sphere ideology on the scope of women’s intellects. Their minds steeped in the canons of domesticity, antebellum women could only venture beyond the home to engage in natural extensions of it, like the amelioration of social ills through participation in benevolent societies. Hence, as women became mere objects of social history, their testimonies, because of the bonds of womanhood they supposedly shared, became virtually interchangeable.

The richness, variance, and intellectual vitality of such testimony, however, lies at the heart of Kelley’s recovery project, and it represents her signal contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship. Through summoning these learned women’s words from copious archival materials and published primary sources, Kelley presents a complex tapestry that depicts women, in their own ways, by their own lights, thinking. Thus she melds women’s history with intellectual history.

She does this by keenly applying several key concepts. The most important of these is “civil society” (5–10), a distillation and refinement of the Habermasian public sphere—not the family and private relations, and not the formal state apparatus, but a site from which “public opinion” (25) emerges, ultimately to shape public life. Kelley positions her learned women as contributors to public opinion through their participation in civil society under the ideology of “gendered republicanism” (25). In the schools they attended, a generation of young women “‘learned,’” according to women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone, “‘to stand and speak’” (132) from the standpoint of a heavily socially-inflected and culturally constructed “subjectivity,” that is, as “a self poised to take action in society” (1–2, n. 1). Through their actions, influence, and example, they thus set the course for the future civic life of the nation’s women (276–79). Thus, under Kelley’s deft alchemy, women’s history and intellectual history become amalgamated through the philosopher’s stone of political culture.

Kelley presents her model, which might be dubbed institutional instrumentalism insofar as the female academies (or seminaries) impel social change, in a careful and deliberate manner. She acknowledges that few women attended, and those that did were usually white and socially privileged (she also discusses some black women by way of comparison). Her key generalizations are based on herculean research, such as her scan of school catalogues, through which she discovered that after the 1820s the curricula of men’s and women’s institutions largely aligned. All this, along with Kelley’s crisp and often elegant writing, ensures that, because of the indelible and finely etched image of learned women she provides, they will not soon be forgotten again.