Examining the life and political theory of 18th-century Anglo-Irish feminist, writer and intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft is the focus of a lecture series sponsored by the Program in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Titled “Mary Wollstonecraft and her Legacies,” the series includes presentations by historians, political scientists and biographers.
Award-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon will deliver the lecture at 7p.m. Wednesday (Oct. 12) in McKenna Hall. Titled “Mary Wollstonecraft’s America,” the talk is based on Gordon’s recent biography of Wollstonecraft titled “Vindication,” published by Harper Collins earlier this year. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture.
Gordon is a research fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University, and a member of the Royal Society of Literature. She is author of critically acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Henry James, and she is the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an early advocate for equality of the sexes who ridiculed the prevailing notions of women as dependent and unintelligent. Many of her ideas are main doctrines of contemporary women’s movements.
Other sponsors of the speaker series include Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Creative Writing Program, Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Program in American Democracy, and Departments of Political Science, Philosophy, History, and English.
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on October 06, 2005.