Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic » (New Edition)

Mary Kelley is Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author, coauthor, or editor of six books, including Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America and The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere (both from the University of North Carolina Press).

Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their 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. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life.