Tamara Harvey, Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700

Tamara Harvey, Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700

What shapes did feminism take before modern feminist movements? This is the question that American literature specialist Tamara Harvey explores in her newly published book Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700.

Harvey writes about the lives and writings of four seventeenth-century English and Spanish colonial women, Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation. These women, she argues, made claims for women based on their ability to practice modesty understood as modestus or “keeping due measure” rather than pudor or female shame.

In her latest book project, she is building on the transamerican and transatlantic implications of her first book, paying attention to women’s use of strategies that were also empowering, but in less "modest" ways as they staked claims for authority on their accounts of commodity, colonization, and empire. Two other projects--related to Harvey's participation in the Mason's Gender Justice Research Group--are also in the works: an edited collection titled “Global Gender Justice: Strategic Interventions” and an article arguing that current ideas of women’s rights as human rights in an international framework may be productively compared.