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Indlæser... Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republicaf Mary Kelley
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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. By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. 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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.40973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Women Women - subdivisions Biography And History North America United StatesLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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Kelley argues that her book is different and unique because it “challenges the familiar model that divides the nineteenth century into private and public, feminine and masculine, household and marketplace.” [1] In Kelley's opinion it was the advent of female academies and seminaries which allowed for both students and teachers to simultaneously dismantle these binary ideas instead linking them to the rights and obligations of citizenship. It was, in Kelley's opinion, this education which allowed women to contribute to national discourse regarding religious doctrine, politics, women and domesticity and the nation's potential.
Kelley argues education should be seen as the reason some women were able to play leading roles in the public space and influence the outcomes. Yet, Kelley's work also demonstrates that women's education suffered from a compromise in which a female education was made dependent on her fulfillment of gendered social and political obligations. Kelley supports the idea that a woman's education was focused on preparing her for her role as a wife and mother. Kelley's book focuses on the ways that women used these expectations to create a new narrative and role for themselves. She believes that women appeared to conform to gendered expectations but instead used these ideas to justify their presence in civil society. She believes that in this way women made themselves crucial to the republican experiment and helped construct the gender, race and class systems of the 19th century.
Kelley argues that though women had a voice it came at a cost: the submission to patriarchal ideals. Kelley's work demonstrates the complex situation that women of the 19th century faced. She showcases that these women were innovative in using education--with its benefits and restrictions--to create change by manipulating aspects of patriarchal ideals to make themselves appear less threatening. “Decade by decade, they revised and elaborated the choices they made… they became influential makers of public opinion. In all this they enacted a transformation in women’s relationship to public life that has proved an enduring legacy.” [2]
[1] Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 25.
[2] Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 279. ( )