Join us for this celebration of Women’s History Month with a talk by Dr. Elizabeth DeWolfe!

Refreshments start at 4:30 p.m.

If “well-behaved women seldom make history,” as historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously quipped, ill-behaved women certainly dominated the historical headlines. Such women were branded as passive, irrational, or depraved, their lives reduced to colorful anecdotes and cautionary tales. But what if we take these women seriously, grant them agency, foreground their point of view, and consider the totality of their lives, as Dr. Elizabeth DeWolfe has done as a historian of American women’s history? This talk will explore how in her work, she has made new use of historical archives to center such women, both recounting their own unique stories and providing a more inclusive and accurate account of the past.

Free and open to the public.

Elizabeth DeWolfe is Professor of History and co-founder of the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program at UNE. For thirty years, Dr. DeWolfe has scoured archives to recover the lives of women that history defined as ill-behaved, reinterpreting and sharing their stories of hardship and heartache in courses in women’s history and in award-winning books. This talk draws on her major research projects, including her recent work, Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, the previously unknown adventure of a Maine stenographer’s secret trade.