Thinking About Women

Outstanding work on early modern women thinkers has resulted in two recent distinctions for Hilda L. Smith, professor of history.

In September, she will serve as keynote speaker for the Women’s History Network annual conference at the University of Hull in Great Britain. Entitled “Women, Power and Knowledge,” the conference brings together specialists in women’s history across Britain, and Professor Smith will open the meeting with an address entitled “Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: Their Paradigmatic Separation.”

“Towards a History of Women’s Political Thought: 1400-1800” is the theme of a second conference at which Smith will offer a keynote presentation next July in Melbourne, Australia. Her address will be titled “Early Modern Women Thinkers and the False Universal.” The conference has been organized by members of the Philosophy Department at Monash University in Melbourne. The presentation builds upon the thesis delineated in Smith’s most recent monograph, “All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832” (2002). It analyses early modern writers’ views of their existence outside the intellectual institutions and controversies of their age.

The event will be funded by the Australian Research Council and is described as an attempt to compose “a history of women’s political thought which incorporates their ideas about political relations between the sexes into the broader context of women’s developing notions of the importance of virtue, liberty, and legitimate power in the state.”

Both keynote speeches follow a special session on Smith’s work during the annual conference of the Western Association of Women Historians held at the University of California, Berkeley in June, 2003.

Professor Smith said of the focus on her work, “While there are a number of us who pursue women’s intellectual history, it is still a rare specialty among those researching and teaching women’s history and gender studies I am most gratified over the recognition of my scholarship outside the discipline of history, which complements the reprinting of my work in anthropological and literary collections, and demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives to women’s studies broadly.”