PDF School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series) by From Brand: The University of North Carolina Press in History

Description

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.