Elizabeth Hewitt: Paradise of Women: Sex, Labor, and Utopianism in the 19th Century

Please Join the Department of English in welcoming Dr. Elizabeth Hewitt from Ohio State University as she delivers her talk, "Paradise of Women: Sex, Labor, and Utopianism in the 19^th Century" on Thursday April 11th at 5:00pm in Hebert 201. 

About the Talk: 

This talk considers how 19^th century utopian fiction and social reform writing paired arguments on behalf of economic equity with moral and economic claims about prostitution. Was the turn to prostitution on the part of both providers and consumers a consequence of poverty, or were there other socio-economic mechanisms at work? How did early socialist writing classify sexual labor when it tried to distinguish labor from leisure? And how can utopian literature—frequently mocked for its absolutist politics—allow us to better see the nuances and subtleties of ideological positions and alignments?  

About Dr. Hewitt:

Elizabeth Hewitt's work concentrates on pre-1900 American and African American literature. Her most recent book, Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States (Oxford UP, 2020) studies the fiscal debates between the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, arguing that the key to the dispute is not found in economic policy but explanatory style. Her first book, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865, was a study of letter writing and American political theory (Cambridge UP, 2005). She is the editor of two volumes in the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown series. She has also published essays on Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Judith Sergeant Murray, Pamela Zoline, and antebellum business periodicals. She is currently researching the long history of science fiction, especially the utopian fictions and experiments in the 19^th century US.