Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health, will present a public talk at the Sargent House Museum in Gloucester, MA on Thursday, May 20, 2021. The free online lecture will be held May 20, 2021, at 6 pm. Q&A to follow live talk.
Gilman was the leading intellectual of the turn-of-the-century American women’s movement. Scholars often take for granted that her papers are safely available for their research, rarely considering how those materials came to be there or whose invisible labor ensured their preservation. In the lecture, Tuttle will share the story of how Gilman’s papers made their way from a home and garage in California to the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. It is a harrowing tale in which, thanks to the interventions of visionary librarians in the Second Wave era, Gilman’s fragile materials brave neglect, obscurity, rodents, insects, mold, wildfires, ice dams, and a host of other perils to cross a continent and find safe haven in the archives.