*   In David S. Shields' brilliant recovery of this world of polite conversation and belles lettres, we are introduced not only to the men whose presence we might have anticipated but to the previously invisible women who were central to discursive institutions of sociability. The salons, literary clubs, tea tables, and assemblies in which colonial America's elite practiced sociability had their antecedents in eighteenth-century British polite society and in pre-Revolutionary Parisian salons. Susan Stabile has shed considerable light on the evolution of salons in the Middle Atlantic colonies. The scholarship of Shields and Fredrika J. Teute carries forward the analysis of sociability into the post-Revolutionary decades. Perhaps most strikingly, they demonstrate sociability's role in transforming women's relationship to the "public sphere" theorized by sociologist Jurgen Habermas. Susan Branson does the same in an illuminating analysis of Anne Willing Bingham's Philadelphia salon. Harriet Guest's superbly argued analysis of their British contemporaries maps the subtle shifts in the meanings attached to public and private that made it possible for English women to conceive themselves as public citizens. In an essay on the recasting of female bodily images during these decades, Susan Klepp has identified a parallel shift in elite women's articulation of a subjectivity that was congruent with their participation in civil society. Recovering what she calls "a radical reimagining of femininity," Klepp argues that these women no longer focused on the pregnant body as the key to a woman's identity and instead emphasized the head and heart. These were also post-Revolutionary America's most highly educated women, and as Klepp notes the practice of controlling fertility and the achievement of high rates of literacy have been consistently linked from the early nineteenth century onward, or she states, "the higher the educational attainment of women, the lower the fertility rates." (915). Jeanne Boydston has observed that the enhanced sense of individual competence and social autonomy resulting from the increased participation of women in the post-Revolutionary transition to capitalism may "have motivated [women's] growing engagement in civic culture in the early republic, including the question of their own participation in the new government." Boydston has also suggested that the increasing importance of women's market labor in the last decades of the eighteenth century may have played a role in the call for equal educational opportunity. The pathbreaking research done by Klepp and Boydston suggests that women whatever their social status envisioned education as a means by which to construct more autonomous selves. See Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); "British-American Belles Lettres," The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 1: 307-343; Lawrence E. Klein, "Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England," in Judith Still and Michael Worton, eds., Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993): 100-115; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Stabile, "Salons and Power in the Era of Revolution: From Literary Coteries to Epistolary Enlightenment," in Larry Tise, (ed.), Benjamin Franklin and Women (University Park: Pennsylvania, 2000): 129-48; Teute, "Reading Men and Women in Late Eighteenth-Century New York," Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Charleston, S.C., March 12, 1994; Shields and Teute, "The Republican Court and the Historiography of the Women's Domain in the Public Sphere," Paper Presented at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, Boston, MA July 15, 1994; Shields and Teute, "Manners Matter in the New Nation," Paper Presented at the Third Annual Meeting of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Old Salem, NC, June 7, 1997; Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001): 125-42; Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Klepp, "Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region, 1760-1820," The Journal of American History 85(December 1998): 910-945; Boydston, "The Woman Who Wasn't There: Women's Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States," Journal of the Early Republic 16( Summer 1996): 195-197.