Ithaca College

Vivian Conger, Associate Professor of History, has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.  Prof. Conger will be using her month-long residence to continue her research, entitled "The Worlds of Deborah Read Franklin and Sarah Franklin Bache: A Transgenerational Exploration of Gender in Revolutionary and Early Republic Philadelphia."

In her project, Prof. Conger argues that historians have written a plethora of biographies examining every aspect of Benjamin Franklin’s seemingly iconic life—except those parts that involve his wife and daughter. This is striking, because historians conceive of the age of transatlantic democratic revolution as time when citizenship was freshly conceptualized and the relations between state and the citizens, and also between men and women, were renegotiated. Prof. Conger's study seeks to refine the questions we ask about the extent to which the politics and culture of the era were infused by specifically gendered relationships. Further, by shifting historical focus to the world of Deborah Franklin and Sarah Franklin Bache, the project explores how social, political, cultural, and economic conditions in Philadelphia constructed and altered male and female roles over time from the age of the American Revolution through the Early Republic.