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Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health in UNE’s School of Arts and Humanities, will present a public talk, "Recovering Lost Voices: The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," at the Sargent House Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Thursday, May 20.

Gilman was the leading intellectual of the turn-of-the-century American women's movement.

In the lecture, Tuttle will share the story of how Gilman's papers made their way from a home and garage in California to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. The library illuminates the lives of American women past and present through its collections, research, and programming and is considered the leading center for scholarship on the history of women in the United States.

According to Tuttle, the story is a harrowing tale in which — thanks to the interventions of visionary librarians in the Second Wave era — Gilman's fragile materials brave neglect, obscurity, rodents, insects, mold, wildfires, ice dams, and a host of other perils to cross a continent and find safe haven in the archives.

“Scholars often take for granted that Gilman’s papers are safely available for their research,” Tuttle said. “Rarely considered are how those materials came to be there or whose invisible labor ensured their preservation.”

The free online lecture will be held May 20, 2021, at 6 p.m. A Q&A session will follow the live talk.