Penn State expert in history and women's studies wins NEH fellowship

Penn State expert in history and women's studies wins NEH fellowship

University Park, Pa. -- Lori Ginzberg, associate professor of history and women's studies in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, has recently won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship Award for 2006-2007 to research a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the nineteenth century's most prominent proponent of women's legal, social, and spiritual equality. Famous for having organized the woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, and authoring its powerful Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton was a complex figure who addressed a wide range of issues. Her feminism was never confined to the demand for the vote; until the end of her long life she would shock even her close coworkers with proposals for liberalized divorce laws and a critique of the constraints that orthodox religion placed on women.

"This book will address the connections between Elizabeth Cady Stanton's personal and her public passions, and critically explore her life as an important feminist theorist and activist," says Ginzberg. "Now that historians have revised an older map of 19th-century feminism, I hope to write a biography that views Stanton's life as a window onto American social and intellectual change itself."

Ginzberg is an affiliated faculty member of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. Her areas of research include United States women's history and 19th-century United States social and intellectual history with a particular interest in the intersections between intellectual and social history.

The author of numerous articles and three books, she has written "Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York" (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Her book "Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th Century United States" (Yale, 1985), was the co-winner of the 1991 National Historical Society Book Prize. Ginzberg, who earned her Ph.D. at Yale University and has been on the Penn State faculty since 1987, teaches a wide range of courses in U.S. history, women's history, lesbian and gay history, and feminist theory.

"I am very pleased that the NEH has recognized the quality of Professor Ginzberg's work with this prestigious award that will support this important work on Stanton's role in nineteenth century America," said College of the Liberal Arts Dean Susan Welch.

The NEH is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.