Event

Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Nineteenth Century Panel

This is an online event.

This panel explores how gender, sexuality, and race shaped the experience of two women in the nineteenth century. Alexi Garrett provides a microhistory that follows the life of Kate Flood McCall (1766-1828), a wealthy, never-married, and Enlightenment-educated white woman who lived and founded nail manufactories in Virginia. Despite having many suitors, McCall never married. Garrett explores this by contemplating the range of possibilities for her and other elite white women’s sexuality, and their socio-economic power, in the post-Revolutionary period. Kathryn Angelica’s essay investigates Rebecca Primus Thomas who established a freedmen’s school in Royal Oak, Maryland in the late nineteenth century. Taking part in the resistance of the Reconstruction South, Thomas joined a network of educational activists, reformers, and political thinkers. Her powerful narrative of Black women’s resistance allows us to reshape genealogies of women’s rights histories to include the influence of abolitionism, the Black church, and community activism.

The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advanced access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.

Register to attend online