Female Genius - by Mary Sarah Bilder (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A biography of Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor, an educator whose 1787 Philadelphia public lecture attended by George Washington might have inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution. Explores women's public roles and political power following the American Revolution through the early nineteenth century, tracing the story of white and Black women's struggles for education and suffrage at a transformative moment"--

Book Synopsis

In this provocative new biography, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s--the Age of the Constitution--to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such public female lecturer, her courageous performance likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution.

Female Genius reconstructs Eliza Harriot's transatlantic life, from Lisbon to Charleston, paying particular attention to her lectures and to the academies she founded, inspiring countless young American women to consider a college education and a role in the political forum. Promoting the ideas made famous by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Harriot brought the concept of female genius to the United States. Its advocates argued that women had equal capacity and deserved an equal education and political representation. Its detractors, who feared it undermined male political power, felt deeply threatened. By 1792 Eliza Harriot experienced struggles that reflected the larger backlash faced by women and people of color as new written constitutions provided the political and legal tools for exclusion based on sex, gender, and race.

In recovering this pioneering life, the richly illustrated Female Genius makes clear that America's framing moment did not belong solely to white men and offers an inspirational transatlantic history of women who believed in education as a political right.

Review Quotes

[Bilder] is a master of fashioning a strikingly original narrative about a seemingly familiar subject... Rescuing from obscurity the story of a highly educated, peripatetic British-American woman named Elizabeth (Eliza) Harriot Barons O'Connor, Bilder provides a compelling new perspective on the deep transatlantic connections that informed debates over women's roles, rights, and status during the last decades of the eighteenth century... Harriot's presence in the United States, according to Bilder, may have produced another impact as well: the gender-neutral wording in the US Constitution. Deliberately or not, the Constitution's gender-neutral language made space for the inclusion of women in the polity in the future. Through Eliza Harriot, Bilder astutely recaptures this important lost moment in American constitutional and women's history.

--American Journal of Legal History

A compelling biography of a woman whose life was both extraordinary and representative... Bilder convincingly argues that debates about female intellectual capacity took center stage during the Age of the Constitution precisely because every one, at least implicitly, understood that education could provide the first step toward political representation... A major contribution of Female Genius is the rich intellectual, transatlantic history of this potentially revolutionary ideal... Today, when voting rights are once again being debated and dismantled, Female Genius provides a fascinating look at a period of time in which women's political equality seemed, at least to some, not only possible but inevitable.

--Journal of the Early Republic

Bilder recovers Harriot's career and what it tells us about gender, rights, and the political culture of the early American republic. She has done extraordinary work to trace a potentially influential figure. As the introduction explains, 'to recover the story of Eliza Harriot is to provide one example that the U. S. Constitution as a system of government was not solely the province of white men.'"

--The Journal of Southern History

Bilder... is a detective extraordinaire. Distinguished by lucid prose and exceptional research, Bilder's Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution resurrects an individual who had been lost to us... Bilder is persuasive in suggesting that Harriot's presence played a role in shaping the final language of the Constitution... Exclusion on the basis on race and sex continued apace in the nineteenth century. And yet, as Bilder shows, women continued to claim an education that equaled that of their malecounterparts in the nation's colleges. The thousands of women who took their learning at hundreds of female academies and seminaries, the legatees of Harriot's students, played a decisive role in asserting and acting on this claim. In this, they bore the imprint of Eliza Harriot.

--The William and Mary Quarterly

Bilder's book adopts the framework of a biography of a once-prominent but long-forgotten woman to illuminate the realities of American women in the era of the formation of the Constitution. For Bilder, Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor (1749-1811) becomes the touchstone from which she explores a transatlantic story of politics, education, and women's rights... Bilder beautifully synthesizes rich scholarship and models the way to write about an idea using the frame of biography.

--New England Quarterly

Bilder's study of a remarkable, complex, and forgotten transatlantic woman is at one level an extraordinary piece of detective work. At a deeper level, this is an exploration of both the possibilities and the limitations of change in an era of war and revolutions.

--Linda Colley, Princeton University, author of The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World

Contemporaries of the traveling lecturer and educational entrepreneur Eliza Harriot, including General Washington, knew her well. But later generations of Americans forgot her, and with her, the depth and breadth of proto-feminism in our founding era. What a thrill, then, to see Eliza Harriot restored to the pantheon by one of our most gifted writers, Mary Sarah Bilder.

--Woody Holton, University of South Carolina, author of Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution

Exceptionally lucid and enjoyable, Bilder's compelling portrait of Eliza Harriot provides a new interpretation of a set of familiar stories: the transatlantic impact of the American Revolution, the crisis of Anglo-American relations, the Constitution's creation and implementation, and the transformative partisan politics of the early republic. Bilder gives us a model to reconstruct women's lives, and she weighs what power meant on the margins of a new democracy.

--Sara Georgini, Massachusetts Historical Society, author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family

Examines the remarkable life of Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor (referred to as Eliza Harriot), a powerful and unique educator in her time. This biographical investigation dives into various stages of Harriot's life, but perhaps most notable was her political influence through public lectures and her ability to establish numerous academic institutions, fostering educational opportunities for women and becoming an advocate for female capacity. . . This eye-opening read details Harriot's journey and seeks to understand the relationship between gender and the Constitution. Highly recommended. General readers and advanced undergraduates through faculty.--CHOICE

This skillfully researched biography of a leading eighteenth-century 'female genius' reminds us that women were everywhere and active in the early republic. We only need to look a little harder and research more creatively, as Bilder demonstrates, to uncover incredibly influential women amid all those men.--Journal of American History

About the Author

Mary Sarah Bilder is Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention.