Age of Jefferson Annual Lecture

The Center for Study of the Age of Jefferson and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation present the 2nd annual Age of Jefferson Lecture featuring Professor Mary Sarah Bilder of Boston College Law School. Join us in Foundation Hall on Thursday, October 27, 2022 at 5 p.m. for Professor Bilder’s talk on her provocative new book, Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (University of Virginia Press, 2022), followed by Q&A and a reception at 6 p.m.

In her book, Professor Bilder 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. She finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator 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.