Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

Abigail Kelley Foster (1811-1887), noted antislavery partisan and women’s rights advocate, was an active correspondent and lecturer on behalf of reform movements in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was married to Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-1881).

This online exhibition explores images, roles, activities, and social expectations of men in the U. S. in the first half of the 19th century.

In this lecture based upon her latest book, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen Of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (Beacon, 2008), Nancy Rubin Stuart will illuminate the life and times of America's first woman playwright and historian. Mercy Otis Warren was also the fiery wife of Massachusetts patriot James Warren, the mother of five sons, and friend and close colleague to John and Abigail Adams.

Legend has it that Betsy Ross created the first American flag. The truth is far less certain and far more interesting. In this program Marla Miller, author of the recently published Betsy Ross and the Making of America, describes how she came to research and write the first scholarly biography of Ross. The story she uncovers is a richly textured study of Ross's long and remarkable life, which included three marriages, seven children, and a successful career as a seamstress and upholsterer.

Ever wonder why the rights of women are still endangered today? Or how marriage can change the destiny of those who marry powerful men? Award-winning author Nancy Rubin Stuart’s presentation from her double biography, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women Who Married Political Radicals illustrates how two teenage brides managed long, happy marriages to famous Revolutionary-era men. Their husbands were the handsome traitor Benedict Arnold and the patriotic General Henry Knox.

For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images.

A humorous companion piece to Amateur Rebekahs. Written by fifteen-year-old Leonard E. Tilden (1861-1937); he became the publisher of the Granite State Courier newspaper in New Hampshire.

What did it mean that in the world's first mass democracy only a minority ruled and that women—free and enslaved, white and Black, single and married—formed the largest group of people barred from full self-government in nineteenth-century America?

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge (Cambridge University Press, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt. Nikki M. Taylor reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners.