Ithaca College

Reading Early American Women’s Lives:  The Revolutionary Performances of Deborah Read Franklin and Sally Franklin Bache

Friday, April 8, 2016, 4-5:30pm in the Handwerker Gallery

Refreshments will be served!

The Robert Ryan Professorship in the Humanities was established in 2001 as part of a bequest from professor emeritus Robert Ryan, who passed away in 2000 after teaching for 42 years at Ithaca College. Professor Ryan’s career was distinguished by his dedication to students, his integrative vision of the humanities, and his continuing commitment to intellectual renewal.

Vivian Bruce Conger was named Robert Ryan Professor in the Humanities in 2013.  Author of The Widows’ Might:  Widowhood and Gender and Early British America (2009), Professor Conger’s current book project explores gender in eighteenth-century Philadelphia through the lives of Deborah Read Franklin and Sally Franklin Bache.  They lived at a time and in a place when women’s roles were in flux; mother and daughter thus provide a unique opportunity to explore shifting concepts of gender. The Franklin women were witnesses to and participants in crucial moments in colonial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary America.  This talk analyzes the gendered cultural performance of politics across generations and over time.  I explore the ways these women constructed and were constructed by the public resistance to the British.  For both, the Philadelphia community and Benjamin Franklin entailed complex, intertwined audiences for their theatricalities.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Dylan Schoch at dschoch@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-1375. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.