English professor studies early American works by women

In the mid-1980’s, when Sharon Harris was a graduate student taking courses in early American literature, only a few works by female writers were offered for study.

“I started thinking there had to be more women writers in that era,” says Harris, now a professor of English.

She embarked on some research, and finding early American female writers became her passion.

“It shaped my career,” she says.

“Now it’s a huge part of early American studies and has become a major part of the field.”

Harris, who joined the UConn faculty in 2005, has published 10 books, including critical studies and collections of scholarly essays on early female writers.

She says she takes a cultural approach to literature: “I think it’s important to know a culture as well as the literature in which that culture was produced.”

She notes that female writers in the past explored the political and social issues of the day, as did their male counterparts.

“For instance, during the era of the Revolutionary War, when the major topic was the issue of liberty, women – who didn’t have citizenship rights or the right to vote – entered into that discussion,” Harris says.

“Some did it by writing political essays, and some wrote novels.”

Many women first expressed themselves in letters and diaries, says Harris, but others were more outspoken.

“Some major women writers of the late 18th century, including Judith Sargent Murray, were very public in their comments.”

In 1790, Murray published an essay called On the Equality of the Sexes.

Harris’s most recent critical analysis, Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law, was an outgrowth of research she initially did for another book, American Women Writers to 1800.

Harris juggles half a dozen research projects at a time.

One of them is a history of feminism, starting with the Greek poet Sappho through the present.

Another is a biography of Dr. Mary Walker, an early 19th-century physician, activist, and nonfiction writer.

Harris spends a good deal of time researching Walker’s papers in archives in Syracuse, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

“Dr. Mary Walker is just amazing,” she says, noting that Walker was the only woman to serve as a surgeon during the Civil War; the first woman to run for the U.S. Senate in the 1880’s; and the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor.

“She was also involved in dress reform,” Harris says, “and this scandalized people. She began to wear pants with a skirt over it, and then went strictly to pants. As a surgeon, she said she could not perform surgery in long skirts.”

She was so well known in her day that the New York Times and the Washington Post referred to her as “Dr. Mary,” says Harris.