Senior Lecturer, Dr. Dawn Hutchinson, will discuss her newest book, Women of the Transcendentalist Club about transcendentalist women engaged in self-culture, an ideal promoted by Reverend William Ellery Channing.

This meant that most were highly educated and perhaps more independent than most women of that era. She will talk about why Transcendentalism and self-culture offered women such independence in the 1800s. Women like Elizabeth Peabody, Louisa May Alcott, and Julia Ward Howe, to name a few, employed self-culture to further their education and become more independent.