Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

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In 1862, Mary Strong stunned her husband, Peter, the scion of a wealthy and influential family, by confessing to a two-year affair with his brother. Peter sued Mary for divorce, but not before she accused him of forcing her into an abortion and having an affair with the abortionist. Then Mary kidnapped their youngest child. New York-based writer Barbara Weisberg recounts the true story of the Strongs’ tumultuous marriage, explosive divorce, and riveting trial that included an array of witnesses from all walks of life and clashing versions of events.

A comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph’s recent book, The Women’s Fight, shows how women--North and South, white and black, enslaved and free—were fully engaged in the wartime struggles on the home front, the military fight, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics.

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter, Ruth, inherited the sack and embroidered it with just a handful of words that evoke her family’s sweeping story of loss and of love. It reads:
 

In the provocative new biography Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia.

Join us as Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. Jones will recount how African American women defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons.

The post-Civil War pictorial press covered the gamut of the American reading public, but few publications were as brazen as illustrated sporting papers. Depicting blood sports, sex, scandal, crime, and, less predictably, current events, these weeklies reveled in impropriety and outrage and were ubiquitous in bars, barbershops, hotel lobbies, liveries, clubs, and other male enclaves.

What would Willa Cather's widely read and cherished novels have looked like if she had never met magazine editor and copywriter Edith Lewis? In this groundbreaking book on Cather's relationship with her life partner, author Melissa J. Homestead counters the established portrayal of Cather as a solitary genius and reassesses the role that Lewis, who has so far been rendered largely invisible by scholars, played in shaping Cather's work.

This year, join us as we take a look back at Jacqueline Jones’ Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist publication, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (1985). Jones will discuss Labor of Love in relation to her other books and her own family life at the time in 1985. She will also talk about the significance of everyday paid and unpaid labor as a subject for historical study, as well as labor history as a form of political activism.

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime in the back room of a New York brothel transformed Lanah Sawyer’s life. It was the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, the seventeen-year-old seamstress did what virtually no one else dared to do: she charged a gentleman with rape. The trial rocked the city and nearly cost Lanah her life. And that was just the start.