Guest lecture/seminar: HOW AMERICAN WOMEN OF THE PROGRESSIVE GENERATION READ THEMSELVES INTO HISTORY
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Lecturer: Barbara Sicherman, writer and professor of American Institutions and Values, Emerita, at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
The generation of women born in America’s first Gilded Age left an extraordinary record of public achievement--as physicians and scientists, educators and social workers, perhaps most of all as leaders of efforts to attain social justice in the early years of the twentieth century. Inspired by their reading (not only what they read but how and with whom), women as different as Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M. Carey Thomas, and Ida B. Wells often lost--and found--themselves in books and worked out a life purpose around them. With Little Women’s Jo March often serving as a youthful model of independence, girls and young women created communities of learning, imagination, and emotional connection around literary activities that helped them entertain and later attain public identities.
Organiser: SKOK and AHKR
