Location
Heather Klemann will speak to accompany the exhibition The Girl's Own Book: Selections from the Ellery Yale Wood Collection. Please join us for: “I" is for “Ideology”: Spelling Books and Primers as Cultural Battleground. What are words like “surveillance” and “usurper” doing in spelling books for children? We might ask this question of the propagandistic Abécédaire de la cour de France (Alphabet Book of the Court of France, Paris, 1814) for young monsieurs and mademoiselles, published during the Bourbon Restoration, where these words appear.
This talk examines how works like the Abécédaire or the patriotic Mother's Picture Alphabet (London, 1862) enfold children into political movements through performances of learning to read: turning pages, sounding words aloud, and connecting images to text. The lecture (via Zoom) is sponsored by the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Libraries and is open to the public.