“Reflections on Gender and Politics in Anglo-America; or, An Intellectual Journey Encompassing Four Decades and Four Books” by Mary Beth Norton

The Fourteenth Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
by Mary Beth Norton

Breaking with the standard pattern of Baron Lectures, Mary Beth Norton (with the concurrence of AAS) will discuss not one book but the four related works in which she examined aspects of the same theme: the relationship of women and the public sphere in Early America, from the beginnings of English settlement through 1800. The talk will examine the trajectory of her work and describe the surprises she encountered along the way.

The four books Norton will discuss include:

• Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980)
• Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996)
• In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692(2002)
• Separated By Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (2011)

Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, where she has taught since 1971, and current president of the American Historical Association. A distinguished scholar of women’s studies, her book Founding Mothers & Fathers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1997 and she was a founder of the Women's Studies Program (now Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) at Cornell. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and AAS (elected 1976).