The Private Lives of Public Women in the Gilded Age (virtual)

In this moderated panel on The Private Lives of Public Women in the Gilded Age, Dr. Linda Perkins, Dr. Heidi Ardizzone, and Dr. Kimberly Hamlin will share the accomplishments and struggles of three notable women who lived at the turn of the twentieth century and inspired generations of women activists, writers, and educators to come. Dr. Perkins will discuss Fanny Jackson Coppin, who, born enslaved in Washington, DC, studied at the Rhode Island State Normal School as a teenager and became a famed educator and longtime principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Dr. Ardizzone will describe the racial prejudice that Belle da Costa Greene faced as the high-profile first librarian of J.P. Morgan’s collection, who rubbed shoulders with high society and bohemian activists alike. Dr. Hamlin will speak to the private struggles of Helen H. Gardener, one of America’s most famous Gilded Age women, who reinvented herself after scandal to become a sought-after writer and suffragist. The three panelists will discuss the unique life journeys of their subjects, while contemplating the effect the Gilded Age had on their lives.

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