The role of women in the American Civil War, says historian and author Catherine Clinton, “was often a topic for folklore and romance, and often restricted to the image of women waiting on the home front for their men to come home.”
In a Chautauqua lecture at Eastern Kentucky University on Thursday, March 21, Clinton will instead share stories of “ordinary and extraordinary women whose contributions to this dynamic era were critical.”
Her lecture, entitled “Women and the American Civil War,” is also the keynote address for Women’s History Month and part of the University’s year-long observance of the Civil War sesquicentennial. The event, at 7:30 p.m. in O’Donnell Hall of the Student Success Building, is free and open to the public.
"North and South, black and white, free and enslaved, we have a new appreciation of how war accelerated the process of changing roles for women,” Clinton said, “and how individual women seized that opportunity – from women who disguised themselves as men to fight in uniform to women who defied convention to serve on the battlefield as nurses. The sesquicentennial gives us an opportunity to revisit the powerful way in which women made their mark during the wartime era.”
Clinton is the author or editor of “Mary Chesnut’s Diary,” “Mrs. Lincoln: A Life,” “Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War,” “Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: An African-American Woman’s Civil War Memoir,” and “Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.” The book on Tubman was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2004 by The Christian Science Monitor and Chicago Tribune.
She recently stepped down from the Executive Council of the Society of American Historians and continues to serve on the Advisory Committee to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
Clinton, now a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast, earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard, master’s from Sussex, and doctoral degree from Princeton.
Other sponsors of the Clinton lecture are the Office of the Associate Provost for Diversity Planning, Department of Government, Department of History, Women and Gender Studies Program, and EKU Cultural Center.
To see the complete schedule of the 2012-13 EKU Chautauqua Lectures, visit www.chautauqua.eku.edu. For more information, contact Chautauqua Lecture Coordinator Dr. Minh Nguyen at minh.nguyen@eku.edu.
To learn more about EKU’s Civil War sesquicentennial observance, visit www.eku.edu/news/sesquicentennial or contact Dr. Tom Appleton at tom.appleton@eku.edu.
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