Dr.
Alison M. Parker
Associate Professor
Department of History
SUNY College at Brockport
(585) 395-5689; Fax: (585) 395-2620
Office: 142 Albert W. Brown Building
E-Mail: aparker@brockport.edu
- PhD The Johns Hopkins University, History, 1993.
- MA The Johns Hopkins University, History, 1990.
- BA University of California, Berkeley, History and the
History of Art, Phi Beta Kappa, 1988.
- NEH Summer Seminar, "Motherhood and the Nation-State in Western
Societies Times," Directed by Karen Offen & Marilyn Boxer,
Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University, Summer
2002.
- Dissertation Research Grant, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger
Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, 1991.
- Ford Foundation Travel Grants for Women's Studies Projects, Johns
Hopkins University, Summer 1993 and 1991, and Spring 1990.
- American History Survey
- American Women's History & Family History
- American Legal History
- Race and Gender in American History
- London Study Abroad Program, Summer 2010: "British Perspectives on the American Revolution" (This class will not be offered again until Summer 2010)
Book:
- Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship
Activism, 1873-1933, University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Edited Books:
- Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America,
edited by Alison M. Parker and Stephanie Cole, Texas A&M
University Press, 2000.
- Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the U.S.
South and Southwest, edited by Stephanie Cole and Alison
M. Parker, Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
Book Series Editor:
- Co-editor, with Carol Faulkner (Syracuse University), of a new series, Gender and Race in American History, for the University of Rochester Press, Fall 2008-.
Articles:
- "Clubwomen, Reformers, Workers, and Feminists of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," in Women's Rights: Perspectives in American Social History, edited by Crista DeLuzio (New York: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming).
- "Women Activists and the US Congress, 1870s-1920s," in The American Congress: Building of Democacy, edited by Julian Zelizer,
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
- "Women's Rights and 'Speech Communities' in American Legal
History," Review essay of Sandra Van Burkleo, Belonging to
the World: Women's Rights and American Constitutional Culture,
in Reviews in American History, Vol. 31, N.1 (March 2003).
- "The Case for Reform Antecedents to the Woman Suffrage Movement,"
in Votes for Women: A Concise History of the Suffrage Movement,
Oxford University Press, 2002.
- "'What We Do Expect the People Legislatively to Effect': Frances
Wright, Moral Reform, and State Legislation" in Women and
the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Alison
M. Parker and Stephanie Cole, Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
- "'Hearts Uplifted and Minds Refreshed': The Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union and the Production of Pure Culture," in Journal of
Women’s History, Summer 1999.
- "Mothering the Movies: Women Reformers and the Censorship of Popular
Culture," in Movie Censorship and American Culture, edited
by Francis Couvares, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
| Recent Conference Papers and Other Presentations
|
- "Re-Envisioning Mary Church Terrell: From Self-Help to a Critique of 'White Lawlessness,'" Seminar on Women’s Biographies, led by Judith Zinsser, Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Summer 2008.
- "Frances Watkins Harper: Anti-Slavery, Public Advocacy, and 'Christian Affiliation' in the United States," American Historical Association, January 2008.
- "Justice is Not Fulfilled So Long as Woman is Unequal Before the Law: Women's Rights, Race and Activism in the Writings of Frances Watkins Harper," Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Summer 2005.
- "Sarah Grimke's Theory of Women's Political Co-Equality," Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), Summer
2002.
- “Culture Wars and Censorship,” Organization of American Historians,
April, 2000.
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Parker has recently completed a draft of her next book, Articulating Rights: 19th Century Women on Race, Citizenship, and the State, in which she argues that black and white women's political thought, as well as their changing tactics and reform agendas, shaped the emergence of a stronger federal government over the course of the nineteenth century. The book focuses on six women reformers, Fanny Wright, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Frances Watkins Harper, Frances Willard, and Mary Church Terrell, each of whom actively asserted women's rightful place in politics and created her own argument for women's full citizenship. The complex dynamics of race within the scope of women's political activism meant that the tensions between black and white women reformers could not be resolved by their shared interest in national legislation. Black women's citizenship was hindered by the limits placed upon them by the color of their skin as well as by their sex. Overall, women reformers' demands for federal regulations to solve a wide variety of problems influenced the trend toward an increasingly strong federal government by the end of the nineteenth century.