For Immediate Release

Date:  February 22, 2006

BLOOMSBURG—The role of women in American history will be the focus of the next program in Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania’s High Noon Talk Series. Jeanette Keith, professor of history, will discuss “Women’s Place and Women’s Rights in American History” Wednesday, March 8, at noon in the Columbia Hall Fireside Lounge. The program is open to the public free of charge.

Keith’s talk will explore how the present-day conservative concept of a woman’s place in the home was started by middle-class men and women in the northeastern United States during the years leading up to the Civil War. Keith will focus on how concepts of womanhood created by American women writers and activists during this period have both helped and hurt the struggle for equal rights for women.

A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Keith has been teaching U.S. history at Bloomsburg University since 1989. She specializes in southern, rural and early 20th century U.S. history. In 2005 Keith received the Willie Lee Rose prize, which recognizes the best book on Southern history written by a woman, for “Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class and Power in the Rural South during the First World War.”

The High Noon Talk Series is sponsored by the BU Commission on the Status of Women.

Bloomsburg University is one of 14 universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. The university serves approximately 8,000 students and offers 65 bachelor’s, 17 master’s and one doctoral degree.

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