| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mary Kelley. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 2006. Pp. x, 294. $39.95.
One of the lasting influences of the Enlightenment was the celebration of education. Mary Kelley's new book demonstrates how that legacy extended to women. In the postrevolutionary era and early nineteenth century, young women displayed a passion for learning—a passion cultivated at female academies—for books, serious conversation, and intellectual attainment. This volume is really a prequel to Kelley's first book, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984). In her earlier study, she detailed the successful careers of many "scribbling women," demonstrating how they combined business savvy with a domestic ideology that justified women's literary production. With this new book, we again run into Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, but now as the end point—the beneficiaries—of a thriving women's educational culture.	1
This study is an homage to the female scholars, mainly young, who attended the many female academies that proliferated in the early nineteenth century. Kelley has tracked down the personal letters of obscure students, who recount their love of learning. She includes a poignant letter from a dying mother, who refuses to have her daughter leave school to care for her. Nothing, this mother felt, should interfere with her daughter's education. Throughout this study, personal stories are intertwined with mounds of detail about curriculum, pedagogy, and the reading tastes of this new class of educated women.	. . .

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