Mary Sarah Bilder is the Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School where she teaches in the areas of property, trusts and estates, and American legal and constitutional history. She received her B.A. with Honors and the Dean’s Prize from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, her J.D. from Harvard Law School, and her A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of American Civilization/American Studies. Her recent work has focused on the history of the Constitution, James Madison and the Founders, the history of judicial review, and colonial and founding era constitutionalism. She is the author of Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press) which won the Bancroft Prize, considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history, and was a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.Female Genius
Thursday, September 20 - 7:00pm
In 1786, Eliza Harriot O’Connor opened her French and English boarding school for young ladies in New York, just one example of a transatlantic surge in assertions of “female genius.” Following the public exhibit of the famous painting of the Bluestockings as the Nine Muses, the early 1780s saw female debating societies in London, the political activities of the Duchess of Devonshire, the growing awareness of learned women across Europe, and a rising insistence on women’s education. In 1783, George Washington and other members of the future Constitutional Convention heard a young Princeton graduate, Gilbert Snowden, give an oration urging America’s embrace of female capacity and education. This cosmopolitan, transnational enlightenment vision of female capacity—female genius—contained the foundations for women’s political participation.