This talk showcases how women over time have used writing as a form of activism and political engagement. Beginning with 17th century poet Anne Bradstreet and touching upon diarist Abigail Adams, among others in the early 19th century, the talk focuses primarily on women writing during the period between the Civil War and WWI — for example, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman — the crucial years leading up to women getting the right to vote in 1920.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.