Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Abstract

In our popular fascination with origin stories, it seems fitting to ask how a book came to be. What was the genesis of Female Genius? For Mary Sarah Bilder, Bancroft prize-winning author and law professor at Boston College, a single line in a George Washington diary from May 1787 nagged at her and, years later, became the basis for her path of discovery. Actually a work of historical recovery and furtherance, Bilder’s book adopts the framework of a biography of a once-prominent but long-forgotten woman to illuminate the realities of American women in the era of the formation of the Constitution. For Bilder, Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor (1749–1811) becomes the touchstone from which she explores a transatlantic story of politics, education, and women’s rights. Not a womb to tomb narrative progression, this is the story of a well-educated British woman, baptized in Lisbon, married to an Irishman (John O’Connor), with whom she lived in both London and Dublin before emigrating to America after the American Revolution. As a way to earn a livelihood, she traveled on the subscription lecture circuit and had the distinction of lecturing before George Washington at the University of Pennsylvania in 1787. She moved frequently in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia and settled in cities where she planned to open a school or academy. It was a world very much in transition over the course of her life as North American colonies threw off British imperial rule