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11mar5:30 pm7:30 pmWomen's History Month Lecture: The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century AmericaLecture

Event Details

The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America

Dr. Kate Haulman

Tuesday, March 11th, 5:30pm

In-Person Event

Join us on March 11 to hear Dr. Kate Haulman talk about her forthcoming book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, which uses the public memory of Mary Ball Washington to explore the role of motherhood in commemorating the American Revolution Through the creation and evolution of the “Mother of Washington” figure in print, images, and the monument to her, memorializing Mary promoted a vision of founding motherhood based in traditional hierarchies of gender, race, and ancestry. As some women framed their political engagement in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation’s origins. The monument, begun by elite men in 1833, languished incomplete for decades, but white women memorialists who identified with Mary finished it in 1894, enshrining their version of motherhood on the landscape. Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood and motherhood to engage with the founding past.

Dr. Haulman, Associate Professor of History at American University, researches and teaches the history of early North America and US women’s and gender history. She is the author of The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011; paperback 2014), winner of the Berkshire Conference Prize for Best First Book in the History of Women, Gender, and/or Sexuality, and co-editor, with Pamela Nadell, of Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (New York University Press, 2013). She co-curated the exhibit “All Work, No Pay: A History of Women’s Invisible Labor in the Home” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History

at the Library Company of Philadelphia

.

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Time

March 11, 2025 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT-05:00)

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21mar2:00 pm3:00 pmFIRESIDE CHAT Reclaiming Women’s Power in the American RevolutionFree

Event Details

Fireside Chat with Dr. Jacqueline Beatty

Reclaiming Women’s Power in the American Revolution

Friday, March 21st, 2025
2 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free

The American Revolution was a war for independence. Yet during this conflict, ordinary American women, in managing crises in their lives, claimed their dependence on husbands, on officials from local institutions, and on the state itself—all patriarchal forces that governed their lives. Join us this March for a “Fireside Chat” that explores the experiences of women who submitted thousands of petitions in the Revolutionary era, demanding remuneration, clemency, property rights, and even divorces, all using language that parroted presumptions of their legal, economic, and social subordination to men. Yet this rhetoric belied the astute and purposeful strategy women employed in their petitions to patriarchal officials. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it.

Dr. Jacqueline Beatty is Associate Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in early American, women’s and gender, and public history. She received her Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2016. In 2015, she was awarded a Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History short-term fellowship at the Library Company for her research. Her first book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was published with New York University Press in 2023. She has bylines in The Washington Post, Time and Salon.

Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History

at the Library Company of Philadelphia

REGISTER

more

Time

March 21, 2025 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm(GMT-05:00)

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Applications Now Open for 2025 Mellon Scholars Summer Internships and Workshop Program

Applications for the 2025 Mellon Scholars Summer Internships and Workshop Program in African American History are now being accepted. The application deadline is March 1, 2025.

The Mellon Scholars Program, an initiative of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History, inspires, educates, and engages emergent scholars through educational and professional development training. Based at the Library Company and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program includes an one-month residential internship and one-week professional development workshop. Both are designed to encourage and inspire talented students from underrepresented groups, as well as other emergent scholars interested in African American history, to explore careers in history, library science, and museum studies.

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