This portrait of Prudence Crandall hangs in the Cornell University Kroch Library Elizabeth Reed Reading Room.Boston has provided me with an amazing opportunity to re-engage what many of you know has been a topic of great passion for me: Prudence Crandall.
Boston has provided me with an amazing opportunity to re-engage what many of you know has been a topic of great passion for me: Prudence Crandall.
I am currently collaborating with the estimable playwright, Stefan Lanfer, to finally bring Crandall’s story to the stage. Right now, my husband Jim is printing the 100 pages of the script so I can make edits (we have a crap printer — he keeps coming in to give me updates — “25 pages printed!”).
I have gone back to the archives in hopes of finding additional primary source materials to help us better understand, know, and represent the women at the center of the events at the Canterbury Female Seminary from 1831-1834. Though they were central, they were quite invisible.
In my undergraduate paper, “Prudence Crandall: Challenging Race and Gender Boundaries in Antebellum America” (snappy title, eh?), I argued that because Crandall and her female students cloaked themselves in the gender appropriate passivity of the time, they were able to be quite radical in their stand against racism. Good academic stuff, according to folks at Trinity.
But now, things are going to get personal.
Prudence 