Schooling the Heart: Emotion at the Litchfield Female Academy

Join Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, Professor of History and Director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program at the College of St. Benedict / St. John's University for Schooling the Heart: Emotion at the Litchfield Female Academy. The lecture, based on her new book The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780-1830, will take place on March 9th at 5:30 p.m. at the Litchfield History Museum. A book signing reception will immediately follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the museum shop for $39.50.

Blauvelt will present her case that, while the Litchfield Female Academyis considered notable for its contributions to women's intellectual development, it also taught women how to feel. She claims that its lessons in emotion were at odds with its intellectual purpose. Blauvelt examined journals, diaries, and museum objects created by the students of Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy for the publication, and used a number of images from the Historical Society's collection as illustrations.

In addition to this book, Blauvelt has published in scholarly journals such as Journal of Women's History, New York History, and Journal of Social History, and also in books of scholarly essays such as volumes 1 and 2 of Women and Religion in America (edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether, Harper and Row), and in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, which was part of the SUNY Series in Feminist Criticism and Theory. Blauvelt earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has been a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and a Fellow for the National Historical Publication Records Commission Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. In addition to St. John's, she has taught in the history departments of the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University. She is currently starting a project on single women between 1780 and 1880, which will center on the sixty two year diary of Susan Heath of Brookline, Mass., and the diaries of her mother and foursisters.

Please call 860-567-4501 or e-mail cbarbacci@litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org to reserve a seat for the lecture. If you have any questions about the event, please call or visit our Web site, http://www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org.