The Castine Historical Society is pleased to welcome biographer Susan Ware for a special talk, entitled “Two Lifelong Partnerships: Molly Dewson and Polly Porter, and the Historian Who Wrote About Them,” Ware’s talk will be presented at Castine’s Unitarian Universalist Church at 86 Court Street on July 12 at 4:30 PM.  The event is free and open to the public.

Excerpted from her website, “A pioneer in the field of women’s history and a leading feminist biographer, Susan Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century U.S. history.  Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, she has taught at New York University and Harvard, where she served as editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (2004).  Since 2012, she has served as the general editor of the American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies.  Ware has long been associated with the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is currently writing a book of suffrage stories inspired by its collections.

Her book, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (Yale University Press, 1987) focuses on the life of Molly Dewson. Dewson, a life-long Progressive reformer and the driving force behind women’s expanded roles in politics and government in the New Deal, inhabited a world where women’s personal friendships and professional associations often overlapped.  Dewson shared most of her adult life with a woman named Polly Porter, a fifty-two-year partnership that profoundly affected her career.  Dewson’s woman centered existence led her to develop a style of feminist political activism that was based on mobilizing networks of reform-minded women in public life and shows one direction feminism took in the years after suffrage.”

You can learn more about Susan and her other publications at http://www.susanware.net/.

Carousel photo courtesy of The New School