Kelley, Mark. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

== Summary ==
This
book examines the movement of women into public life during the post-revolutionary/antebellum
period and looks at the impact this transformation had on individual and social
identities. It centralizes the role of schooling at female academies and
seminaries in mediating this process and argues that education was far more
expansive and radical (than previously recognized) and transformed a generation
of women. Kelley argues that educated (elite) women created social identities
as learned women that signaled their entrance into civil society, their
increased influence on public opinion, and an expanded (though gendered) role
in the republic. As writers, editors, teachers and reformers, women entered the “public sphere” or the
social space between the institutions of family life and the nation-state and
challenged normative binaries (private/public, male/female) and through
voluntary organizations (literary societies) women increased their claim to a
public voice and intellectual authority. In schools, literary societies, and
other organizations, “women addressed the larger meanings of knowledge…
practiced the art of persuasive self presentation, and instructed themselves in
the values and vocabularies of civil society.” (14) These women thus created and
configured what Kelley calls a “gendered republicanism.”
See Also: Anne Scott