Women, Law, and Disability in Early America
17nov7:00 pm8:00 pmWomen, Law, and Disability in Early AmericaFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early America
with Jennifer Reiss
Tuesday, November 17th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free
What can the Library Company’s collections teach us about the intersections of women’s lives, disability, and the law? Dr. Jennifer Reiss, the 2025–2026 Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellow, will share materials she explored during her fellowship to uncover how women experienced and navigated legal and social systems in early America. This program will highlight the power of everyday documents as “keys” to understanding the past, in this case revealing histories of gender, disability, and lived experience.
Jennifer Reiss is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania working on the North Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. Jennifer is particularly interested in women and gender, early modern medicine and disability, and British and early American legal history. Her dissertation project, provisionally titled Undone Bodies: Gender and the Making of Disability in Early America, reconsiders how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era.
