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照片:凯特琳·坎宁安
书
女性天才
BC Law Professor Mary Sarah Bilder chronicles the political feats of the eighteenth-century education activist Eliza Harriot.
2022年秋季
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Modern politicians understand how to play to the media with provocative tweets and photo ops. 在她的新书中， 女性天才: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution, BC Law School Founders Professor Mary Sarah Bilder introduces readers to one of the original political influencers, the eighteenth-century education activist Eliza Harriot O’Connor. 让大家注意到她的使命, Eliza Harriot—as Bilder refers to O’Connor—knew she had to secure an audience with George Washington. And in doing so, Bilder suggests, she altered the course of history.
在18世纪末, the well-connected O’Connor—born in Portugal of British parents—toured the United States, advocating for women’s education as the nation’s first female public lecturer. Determined to get Washington’s attention, she scheduled one of her talks for a time when the future president was most likely to be available. 事实上, shortly before the Constitutional Convention, Washington did attend one of her 1787 lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. 她意识到, if Washington was the most important person in the United States, 如果他能来听她的讲座, then all the newspapers would pick it up and comment比尔德说. “She delayed her lecture for a day so that he could show up. It went viral in the eighteenth-century sense, with over 150 advertisements or commentaries about her in the summer of 1787.”
Bilder believes Eliza Harriot’s ideas about gender equality in education and political participation influenced the Constitution’s gender-neutral language, with its references to “persons” or “citizens.“这是令人兴奋的, 承诺的时间, 《电子游戏正规平台》说, when American law was very much in flux and the question of women’s suffrage hadn’t yet been decided. “This is a moment where things were more open—the kinds of constitutional exclusions that became very clear in the later 1790s aren’t quite yet in place,”她说。. 例如, New Jersey’s constitution authorized women to vote until the state legislature stripped that right away in 1807.
Bilder discovered Eliza Harriot while researching her last book, Madison’s Hand: Revisiting the Constitutional Convention这本书获得了班克罗夫特奖. 阅读华盛顿的日记, she spotted references to the ambitious Eliza Harriot, who ran a boarding school for young women in New York that focused on belles lettres, 朗诵, 数学, 和地理. Washington even called her ideas “tolerable,” which was true praise for the time. “我一直很喜欢这样. 达西在 傲慢与偏见比尔德说. “It’s not a complete embrace, but it’s certainly not rejection. It’s a kind of openness to the idea that women aren’t inferior.”
像这样, opposing republican motherhood—the post-Revolutionary notion that American women should be educated only to support male family members—figures prominently in Eliza Harriot’s story. 这个想法最直言不讳的批评者之一, she secured a five-day invitation to Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in 1788 to discuss plans for a young ladies’ academy there. “She doesn’t move to the United States thinking, “我是一个低等的人,’”比尔德笑着说. 她不请自来地来到弗农山庄. She didn’t even have a carriage, so Washington sent a carriage for her.” Eliza Harriot went on to open female academies throughout the South.
标题 女性天才 is a nod to Eliza Harriot’s ingenuity, which stood out at the time in America, even as female debating societies and political involvement were taking root in Europe. 在某些方面, Bilder considers Eliza Harriot to be the lesser-known, stateside version of the British activist Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored the landmark feminist work, 《电子游戏正规平台》 which argued that women deserve the same fundamental rights, including access to education and political representation, 是男性的.
女性天才 spotlights not only a trailblazer for women’s rights but also an overlooked era, pre-Constitution, when women had the potential right to vote, and weren’t merely consigned to domestic duties. 然而,, 尽管这短暂的希望, women were gradually edged out of politics and education—and the trajectory of Eliza Harriot’s life unfortunately followed suit. 在她最初的成功之后, she lived an itinerant life due to the debts of her would-be writer husband. “It’s a sort of sad story比尔德说. “Early nineteenth-century constitutions moved toward explicitly enfranchising white men. Eliza Harriot’s story tracks that larger story—and yet, it also reminds us how inspirational women pushing at these boundaries were.” 
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