Severance, Caroline M. Seymour (Caroline Maria Seymour), 1820-1914, The Mother of Clubs, 1830-1980, Caroline Maria Seymour Severance papers, 1830-1980 (bulk 1860-1914). | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Most Americans know the names Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman. Few realize both women lived into their eighties and described their later years as filled with pleasure, happiness, and sustained activism — not decline.
That reframe is the premise of “Old Women, Race, and Power,” a two-day academic conference that opens Friday, March 6, at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Convened by historians Corinne T. Field of the University of Virginia and Kimberly Hamlin of Miami University in Ohio, the conference gathers scholars from multiple disciplines to examine how older women — across racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds — have exercised power and shaped history from the 17th century to the present.
The conference, which runs through Saturday, March 7, arrives during Women’s History Month and draws on The Huntington’s role as one of the world’s foremost humanities research institutions. The Huntington’s library holds more than 11 million items, including the papers of Caroline Severance, a 19th-century suffragist and abolitionist known as the “Mother of Clubs,” who helped found what is widely considered the first women’s club in the United States and remained active in Los Angeles reform movements into her nineties.
Field, an associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality whose research focuses on the intersections of age, gender, and race in U.S. history, is currently writing a book titled “Feminist Aging in Nineteenth-Century America” that examines how activist intellectuals developed arguments for old age empowerment. Hamlin, the Chamberlin Family Professor of History and chair of the history department at Miami University, is an award-winning author whose book “Free Thinker” about suffragist Helen Hamilton Gardener was named a Top Ten Biography of 2020 by the American Library Association’s Booklist, according to her publisher.
The conference description, provided by The Huntington, states that negative stereotypes of older women persist across early modern culture — “hags, spinsters, crones, witches” — while the actual record shows older women providing vital labor, advocacy, and caregiving that kept economies, families, and societies functioning. The scholars aim to explore how older women, freed from pregnancy and childrearing, exercised agency even as the broader culture dismissed them.
In the American context, conference organizers note, older women — especially women of color — have served as what they call “the bulwarks of democracy,” registering voters, working the polls, and building the institutions that sustain it.
Among the scholars presenting are Daniel Livesay of Claremont McKenna College, who is researching a book on old age in New World slavery, and Daniel Horowitz, professor emeritus of American studies at Smith College, who will speak on women’s activism, aging, and retirement. Susan Juster, The Huntington’s W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, is also listed on the program, according to The Huntington’s event page.
The conference is co-sponsored by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, which supports advanced research on human societies between 1450 and 1850, and funded by an anonymous donor and the institute. The Huntington typically hosts six two-day academic conferences each year, open to the public.
The Huntington is located at 1151 Oxford Road in San Marino, about five miles from downtown Pasadena. Registration is $50 for general admission, $30 for Society of Fellows members, Huntington members, and readers, and free for students and research fellows. An optional lunch is available for $20 each day. Lunch reservations closed on February 20, but a limited number of lunch tickets will be available at the conference, according to The Huntington. For questions, email researchconference@huntington.org or call 626-405-3432. The full schedule is available at huntington.org.
“Scholars have not yet paid sustained attention to the history and power of older women,” the conference description states. The two days in San Marino aim to change that.
