Katharine Bement Davis (1860-1935) was a force for women’s rights and social reform.
As one of the first women in the U.S. to earn a PhD, she became the first superintendent of New York’s Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, Westchester County (now the state’s only maximum security women’s prison), and later, the first female Commissioner of Corrections for New York City, where she instituted critical reforms and quelled a major uprising.
In the final decade of her career, Davis led the Bureau of Social Hygiene, a think tank focused on combating commercialized sex and curbing sexually transmitted infections, while conducting the first comprehensive study on female sexuality.
At the Bedford Reformatory, she offered inmates valuable educational and recreational opportunities and employed a team of highly educated women as physicians and psychologists.
As Commissioner of Corrections, she tackled what was considered “a man’s job,” while also championing women’s suffrage. Her study of women’s sexual desires and experiences redefined the boundaries of “normal” female sexuality.
Drawing on extensive research from Davis’s personal papers, institutional records, and historical publications, Dr. Anya Jabour, Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana, will offer a presentation, “Trailblazer: How Katharine Bement Davis Advanced Women’s Equality in the Workplace, at the Polls, and in the Bedroom,” virtually and in the Susan B. Anthony Museum Carriage House in Rochester, NY, at 1 pm on Wednesday at 1 pm ET.
Jabour will uncover Davis’s remarkable, though often overlooked, contributions to equality for women in the workplace, at the polls, and even in the bedroom.
You can register online here.
Photo: Katharine Bement Davis in ca 1915 (Library of Congress).
Source link
