The Michelle Smith Lecture Series
Female Genius
This provocative new biography looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius.
The perfect exemplar of this phenomenon was Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor, a path-breaking female educator who delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such public female lecturer, her courageous performance likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution.
Female Genius reconstructs Eliza Harriot’s transatlantic life, from Lisbon to Charleston, paying particular attention to her lectures and to the academies she founded, inspiring countless young American women to consider a college education and a role in the political forum.
In recovering this pioneering life, the richly illustrated Female Genius makes clear that America’s framing moment did not belong solely to white men and offers an inspirational transatlantic history of women who believed in education as a political right.
Mary Sarah Bilder
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 is the author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention, which was also a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.