Learning to Stand and Speak
Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic

Mary Kelley (Author)

9780807859216

Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2008

312 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.369 kg

This title examines training women in the arts of citizenship. Education played a decisive role in recasting women's collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. With a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, cultivated one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.