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Bowdoin’s Scanlon: ‘Taking Women Seriously, Wherever We Find Them’ Archives

October 16, 2011 by Doug Cook

Jennifer Scanlon

Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin’s William R. Kenan Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, will give a lecture to inaugurate her appointment to the Kenan Professorship at 7:30 p.m. Monday, October 17, 2011, in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center.

Women’s history as a field has come a long way from its early “add women and stir” approach, in which women were supposed to fit into those same historical narratives that had been so successful in ignoring or negating them.

In her talk, “Taking Women Seriously, Wherever We Find Them,” Scanlon will present three case studies from her work that reflect themes in the discipline: The Shopper, The Popular Women’s Magazine Reader, and Behind-the-Scenes Political Organizer.

“Women’s Studies had its beginnings in the 1970s, in the midst of the second wave of the feminist movement,” notes Scanlon. “This group of women began looking at the ways in which issues in their lives did or did not relate to what they studied in their academic lives. They started to ask new questions of the field.” Read more.