Contact: Laura Laffrado, professor of English, (360) 650-2886 or laura.laffrado@wwu.edu
BELLINGHAM—Laura Laffrado, professor of English at Western Washington University, had her new book “Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing” published in March by The Ohio State University Press.
In her book, Laffrado writes about early American women’s autobiography. She discusses how these uncommon women were able to write about their daring actions without being penalized for such unusual behavior.
Among the works that Laffrado discusses are Sarah Kemble Knight’s journal of her unconventional solo travel through the New England wilderness; Fanny Fern’s controversial, anonymous newspaper essays; unmarried Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches”; and S. Emma E. Edmonds’s account of disguising herself as a man in order to fight in the Civil War in “Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.” Laffrado also examines African-American Harriet Jacobs’s account of the seven years she spent hiding in her grandmother’s attic in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.”
“I’m really interested in what these women’s lives might say to women in the 21st century who might not want to or be able to live in restrictive conventional ways,” Laffrado said. “If these women have any message to send, it’s ‘behave as unconventionally as you dare, but in order to get away with that behavior, pretend to be very conventional.’ The women that I studied behaved in uncommon ways, but they projected the image of the conventional woman.”
Laffrado is a specialist in early U. S. literatures and culture. She is a past winner of Western’s Excellence in Teaching Award and has published widely on American literature.
For more information, please contact Laura Laffrado at (360) 650-2886 or laura.laffrado@wwu.edu.
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