Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 311 pp.

Mary Kelley's book, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic, is a textual analysis that "highlights the significance of education as the key both to women's entering civil society and to the influence they exercised as makers of public opinion" (15). Focusing specifically on the relationship between women's placement in academies and seminaries and women's engagement within civil society, Kelley points to the ways in which women influenced public opinion through their roles as teachers, writers, and editors. In these positions, Kelley posits, women "contributed to national discourses of religious doctrine and denominationalism, on politics and political parties, on women and domesticity, and on the nation and its potential as the world's redeemer" (10) before they were able to establish full citizenship through voting or obtaining property or divorce rights.