2018 George Washington Lecture - Part 3

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George Washington's Mount Vernon

Mary Sarah Bilder

Award-winning constitutional historian Mary Sarah Bilder delivers a three-part educational series to provide a deeper understanding of Founding Era. The provocative set of lectures, titled The Lady and George Washington: Female Genius in the Age of the Constitution, argues that the Constitution was drafted in an extraordinary moment of female progress. The life and career of the remarkable Eliza Harriot O'Connor, first American female lecturer and principal of a female academy, will guide this exploration of the ways women and men of the framing era understood female intellect and imagined female political capacity.

Mary Sarah Bilder is the Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School where she teaches in the areas of property, trusts and estates, and American legal and constitutional history. Her recent work has focused on the history of the Constitution, James Madison and the Founders, the history of judicial review, and colonial and founding era constitutionalism. She is the author of Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press) which won the Bancroft Prize, considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history, and was a finalist for the 2017 George Washington Prize.