Cornelia Dayton presents: The American Revolution Homefront: New England Families & Women’s Lives in Turmoil
October 28 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
FREE
Join us at the La Grua Center on Wednesday, October 28th for a fascinating evening with Dr. Cornelia H. Dayton. Dr. Dayton will highlight New England women on the homefront whose lives were suddenly or violently disrupted and who wrote about it. Their stories help us grapple with the emotional toll exacted by political strife and war. Diaries, letters, and court records offer windows onto white and Black women’s fears and strategizing. She will also explore the ways in which courtships and marriages were tested or ended amid revolutionary discord.
Cornelia H. Dayton is the author of books such as Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 and Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 7 th -10 th editions (with Linda Kerber et al.). Her research has uncovered new findings about the life and marriage of poet Phillis Wheatley Peters, as featured in the documentary by Askew Pictures, In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters. She attended Harvard-Radcliffe and received her PhD from Princeton University. Recently retired, she taught courses on ‘vast’ early America, law in US society, women and gender, and Revolutionary Boston at the University of Connecticut.