Scholar to speak at WMU on famed feminist Gilman

By Megan Higdon
Western Herald

University of South Carolina’s Cynthia Davis, Ph.D, will speak on well-known feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman tonight at 7:00 p.m. in Room 3025 of Brown Hall.

The event comes as a continuation of Western Michigan University’s English Department’s Scholarly Speaker Series.

Her lecture, titled, “The World was Home for Me: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Sentimental Public Sphere,” will focus on the works of Charlotte Gilman including stories and poems, which centered on the social struggles women faced in society.

“The main point of the talk is to place Gilman in the sentimental tradition of her great-aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, although I will argue that, unlike pre-Civil War sentimentalists like Stowe, Gilman sentimentalized work and the public sphere rather than the home and the private sphere,” Davis said.

Gilman became an important woman in her time by breaking many of the social barriers held against women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
According to Davis, she believed that it was important for women to break away from stereotypical roles and let their voices be heard in society.

Gilman was named the sixth most influential woman of the twentieth century in a poll commissioned by the Siena Research Institute, and in 1994 was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

As a professor and undergraduate English director at the University of South Carolina, Davis has written many literary pieces including novels and articles on Gilman, and is currently working on a biography.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=8902

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Sep 30 2009. Filed under Campus, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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