I am interested in women’s and gender history as well as the history of the book in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.  “Book history” is a bit of a misnomer, as the interdisciplinary field encompasses printed materials well beyond books (periodicals, pamphlets, and visual materials, for example).  In addition to content and authorship, I am interested in how the production, marketing, and dissemination of print culture shaped gendered expectations.

My current project, “Fashioning American Women: Godey’s Lady’s Book, Female Consumers, and Periodical Publishing in the Nineteenth Century,” positions antebellum women’s periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book as central to the emergence of modern advertising and gendered consumerism.  My research brings together the histories of gender, periodical publishing, and the early American economy to trace how publisher Louis A. Godey deviated from his colleagues and increasingly looked at women as eager participants in the market economy.  Consequently, the parlor magazine became phenomenally influential not only because editor Sarah Josepha Hale skillfully selected literary content for middle-class women.  The Lady’s Book helped sculpt readers’ modes of consumerism; it connected women to goods and turned many into saleswomen themselves.

I am also pursuing a project related to another of Mrs. Hale’s many pursuits; this one examines debates about gender sparked by a ladies’ fundraiser for the Bunker Hill Monument in Massachusetts.  The cornerstone for the Monument had been laid by Lafayette in 1825, but by 1830, the monument was half-finished.  The association charged with constructing it was not only broke, but in debt.  Hale used her Ladies’ Magazine to call for an 1830 ladies’ subscription in order to raise the $50,000 needed.  She was surprised to find that this ignited a debate in New England periodicals about whether it was proper for women to raise money for a military monument.  Ten years later, Hale was at the center of a second ladies’ fundraiser for the monument: a week-long bazaar that received no criticism and that raised almost $30,000.  The article assesses the continuities and differences of the gendered rhetoric around both fundraisers.