Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History ... and the University of North Carolina Press)

I'm a sucker for anything on women's history, but this was outstanding and led me to new sources. I would use it in classroom work.

Learning to Stand and Speak is a sprawling book that addresses formal intellectual life in women's seminaries and literary societies as well as less formal intellectual life in sewing circles, correspondence, and the like. While Revolutionary Era republican motherhood envisioned a purely domestic, if politically significant, role for women, the "gendered republicanism" of the early republic also envisioned a role for women in the public sphere (p. 25). Kelley explicitly links women's intellectual life to voluntary societies and illustrates how reading and discussion circles promoted women's involvement in missionary work and abolition, and vice versa. Graduates of the new women's academies played prominent roles in this "organized benevolence" (p. 29). In another chapter, Kelley delineates how closely women's seminaries in the early republic resembled men's college--in curriculum, reading lists, size, cost, and even faculty. If anything, the women's academies offered more modern, and possibly more substantive, curricula than the men's colleges did. All in all, this is truly essential reading for anyone who is interested in the history of women's education and intellectual life in the nineteenth-century United States.