Jennifer Tuttle delivers keynote address at international conference in Rome on Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Chair and associate professor of English, was the keynote speaker at an international conference in Rome celebrating the 150th birthday of American social philosopher Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The conference, titled “Donne e Polis: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Oggi” (“Women and Polis:  Charlotte Perkins Gilman Today”), was held Oct. 22-23, 2010 at the University of Rome III and brought together Gilman scholars from the U.S. and Europe to discuss the continuing relevance of Gilman’s vision for contemporary feminisms. 

It was the first conference to be devoted to Gilman in Italy, where she is little known even though her best-known work “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is regularly taught in university courses devoted to American Literature or Women’s Studies. The aim of this timely event was to reconsider Gilman’s analysis of the social dynamics of power, gender, and sexuality today in Italy.  The stereotyped representation of women in Italian culture and their virtual non-existence in political and economic institutions recently has been an urgent topic of discussion in Italian media and has also attracted the attention of foreign commentators.  This event wove together presentations by an international array of Gilman scholars as well as a number of Italian journalists and writers, and was open to students, faculty, and the general public.

Tuttle is the author and editor of several books and articles about Gilman.  She also serves as the president of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society.

Since the 1970s the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), the prominent American sociologist, writer, and feminist lecturer, has received much attention in the United States, and in Europe as well, thanks to its lucid analysis of gender inequality in both the private and the public spheres – from the labor market to education to intimate relationships – and its impressive depiction of the socio-economic and cultural consequences of the gender gap on the human community as a whole. In 1993 Gilman was named in a poll commissioned by the Siena Research Institute as the sixth most important American woman of the twentieth century, and in 1994 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

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