To modern audiences, feminists and abolitionists are heroic figures who fought for liberty and defended human dignity. Yet standard accounts rarely consider these figures in their full complexity. Throughout the nineteenth century, radical reformers fought for women’s rights while summoning the spirits of dead people. They agitated for abolition while magnetizing their friends, reading people’s skulls, and trying to cure cancer with water-soaked sheets. This talk will explore this vibrant history. It starts from a simple premise: activists’ alleged eccentricities were not distinct from their crusades for racial justice and gender equality. They were part of a broader reform agenda, which collectively challenged society’s most basic assumptions about race, gender, sex, and science.

March 19
4-5:30 p.m.
255 Old Horticulture

Rachel Walker is an Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford. As both a scholar and a teacher, Dr. Walker specializes in the history of gender, race, and popular science in early America. Her first book, Beauty and the Brain, uncovers the history of physiognomy: a once-popular but now discredited science, rooted in the idea that people’s facial beauty reveals their moral and mental character. Dr. Walker’s research has garnered long-term fellowships from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.