Gina Luria Walker

Gina Luria Walker is Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The New Historia at The New School in New York City. She teaches Women's Intellectual History and is one of world's foremost scholars on eighteenth-century feminist intellectual Mary Hays and her circle.

Walker's core focus is recovering the lost contributions of historical women. In 2015 Walker partnered with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum to direct Project Continua, a website devoted to female biographies.^[1][2] Her latest work in regaining women displaced from the historical record is The New Historia, a project that is part-encyclopedia and part-virtual reality and uses three-dimensional mapping to create new ways of interacting with female networks and intellectual contributions. Her collaborator on this project is information architect Lisa Strausfeld, and together their vision is to create a "Google Earth for knowledge."^[3][4]

Professor Walker previously held faculty appointments at Rutgers University and Sarah Lawrence College.^[5]

Biography[]

Walker received her Ph.D. in 18th century Literature at New York University where she was given the Founders’ Day Award for doctoral studies. These included discovery of primary documents by and about Hays in private hands, now part of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at The New York Public Library. Her areas of research include the history of learned women, women and Rational Dissent, late Enlightenment Feminisms, and women's autodidactic production of new knowledge.

Professor Walker is a Member of the International Advisory Board, UDC International Doctoral School, Universidade Da Coruña, Spain and on the Advisory Editorial Board, Enlightenment and Dissent, Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary University of London. She is actively involved in encouraging new Wikipedia encyclopedia articles on historical women and is an authority on historical encyclopedias.^[6]

Early life and education[]

Walker completed her undergraduate work at Barnard College and earned her master's degree at Columbia University. At Columbia, she intended to study the writer Jane Austen, placing her in the intellectual spectrum of the late Enlightenment. The Graduate Student Advisor discouraged her by saying that “there was nothing more to be learned about Jane Austen.” Walker ultimately published her thesis on the personal writings of James Boswell––using his recently discovered journals as source material––as viewed through the prism of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). Her advisor praised her thesis but told her she was “too pretty to bother with a Ph.D” and that she should “go home and get married.”^[7]

Greatly discouraged, she nevertheless applied to New York University to pursue doctoral research. She intended to study “a highly self-conscious woman on the margins of the late Enlightenment.” Kenneth Neill Cameron (1908–1994), the Oxford-trained scholar and expert on Percy Shelley, became her advisor.^[8] Unlike her previous academic experience, Cameron agreed that she could study Jane Austen.^[9]

However, Cameron first encouraged her to visit the New York Public Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, of which he was the founding Director, as ask to see what information was available about Mary Hays.^[10]

Mary Hays[]

After researching the available material on Mary Hays in the Pforzheimer Library, Walker received a grant to meet with the owner of Hays’ private correspondence in London. The owner of the letters was reluctant to share them because Hays had been a controversial figure during her lifetime. Her writing was criticized for questioning the inequality of the sexes, and she was personally attacked for pursuing knowledge (historically a male occupation) and being homely. In 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to her as “a Thing, ugly and petticoated.”

On the last day of her visit, the owner of the letters permitted Walker to view the 115 private letters to and from Hays in correspondence with Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Robert Southey, Eliza Fenwick and others. Walker felt a complicated relationship with Mary Hays:

“While I wanted to understand, empathize with, and defend Hays, her authorial self was so unlike the wise, steady persona presented by Austen’s narrators that had inspired me, that I, too, could not warm to her. She was angry, self-pitying, narcissistic, filled with resentment and yearning. Her unquiet spirit struggled against the tide of responses to her as unlovely, abrasive and unlovable, confirmation that no respectable man would want her. Studying Hays seemed to take me further away from the apparently safe, hallowed shores of the Canon. I felt adrift; as an uncredentialled female autodidactic, Hays offered no safety.”

In 1972, Walker was awarded a doctorate for her work on Mary Hays. Hays' biographies of historical women struck Walker; she wondered why Hays would undertake such a project, a departure from her earlier philosophical work. Mary Hays had been a close friend of early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. When Wollstonecraft passed away from complications of childbirth in 1797, Hays mourned her death by compiling biographies of 302 iconoclastic women. She wrote as a way to channel her pain and fortify herself by documenting the accomplishments of great female thinkers of the past. It was one of the earliest instances of feminist historical recovery.

Hays’ instinct to document the lives of neglected historical women would inspire the course of Walker's career.”^[11]

Academic work[]

Female Biography Project[]

In 2009, the Chawton House Library––an estate once owned Jane Austen’s brother that now supports the recovery of early women’s writing––commissioned Walker to reproduce Mary Hays’ Female Biography; or, memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women from All Ages and Countries (1803). Walker's edition was published in 2013 and 2014 by Pickering & Chatto.

In order to recreate Hays’ work with proper annotation, Walker established a network of 200 scholars, representing 120 institutions in eighteen countries, who collaborated to burnish the “female biographies” of the women Hays included. These scholars, working under the name Female Biography Project, recovered historical material about previously lost women.^[12]

Project Continua[]

Project Continua launched in 2012 as the online compendium to the Female Biography Project. Scholars realized they had surpassed Mary Hays’ source material yet continued to uncover female philosophers and intellectuals who were lost to history. The goal was to create a public, multimedia resource dedicated to the preservation of women's intellectual history from the earliest surviving evidence into the 21st Century. "There have always been women producing knowledge and contributing to human understanding and participating in the great events and new ideas of their time," said Gina Luria Walker in an interview. "Most of whom have been ignored, trivialized, or written out."^[13] The project features biographies and references to additional source material for scholars interested in conducting further research.^[14] Walker partnered with the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum to direct Project Continua.^[15]

Walker and the scholars initially believed they were supplementing the traditional historical canon with new information––hence the name Project Continua––but as the scope of previously unknown and suppressed material came to light, they renamed their effort The New Historia.^[16][17]

The New Historia[]

Having exhumed biographical information about and philosophical writing by thousands of previously lost historical women, Walker and the scholars felt apprehensive about publishing their findings in traditional formats. They feared their research would follow a trajectory common to historical women: initially their stories would be included in publications, then treated anecdotally, and eventually lost and neglected, repeating the established treatment of women in history.

There is a saying in gender studies called “just add women and stir;” the premise being, that if stories of a few great women are added to the traditional canon, history is now “inclusive.” The truth is that with this approach the traditional, male-dominated history isn't challenged in any way––it's still the same narrative and interpretation, and over time, the women will disappear from the narrative.^[18] On this note, Walker states:

“More women wrote texts and contributed to society in the past than we can possibly believe. They left evidence of their lives and then disappeared; sometimes they were resurrected, only to be buried again. Their work was lost through either intentional destruction or neglect, leaving a void of women’s historical invisibility. Our work today is reconstructing the lost knowledge of women’s ideas and productions. If we persist in only studying women through the prisms of male-knowledge ordering systems, old inaccuracies will remain, and history will continue to ignore past female thinkers and actors and their transformative responses to the obdurate presence of historical misogyny.“^[19]

To create an entirely new approach feminist history, in 2018 Walker partnered with Information Architect Lisa Strausfeld to showcase the data she and her scholars had unearthed. The result was the Cooper Engine––named after Strausfeld's late mentor, Muriel Cooper, a digital designer and co-founder of MIT's Media Lab.

The Cooper Engine is an immersive, three-dimensional timeline that charts the course of each woman's life as it spreads through the decades. Users can move forward and backward in time––like a Google Earth for learning––exploring each woman's work, publications, and networks of relationships. Instead of historical data about women being relegated to a handful of written pages––where it risks being lost, yet again, in the traditional historical narrative––users step inside the data, into a new dimension of learning and knowing historical women. A searchable digital platform connects modern women with their mostly unknown foremothers who were female groundbreakers of the past.^[20][21]

The project is still in its early stages.

Wikipedia[]

Disturbed by the gender disparity of Wikipedia's content, Walker started an Edit-A-Thon in 2015 to train more women as Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia is the Internet's largest source of free information, yet less than ten percent of Wikipedia editors are women, and only six percent of experienced editors are women. This is reflected in the site's content which is distorted in favor of men's contributions to science and philosophy.^[22]

“Historically, Wikipedia may not be that different from the very first encyclopedias, which developed as a way for educated men to communicate with each other and create foundational knowledge” said Gina Luria Walker during an interview with The Atlantic. "Around 150 men contributed to the great encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, Walker pointed out, but no women did. The very first version of Encyclopædia Britannica, written between 1768 and 1771, featured 39 pages on curing disease in horses, and three words on woman: 'female of man'."^[23]

In particular, Wikipedia suffers from an age-old sexist tendency, that of defining a woman by her relationship status with a man.^[24]“The pages that do exist about notable women are more likely to mention their gender and relationship status than articles about men.”^[25]

“There needs to be a conscious collaborative determination by women, including girls, that we want to know about women of the past, we want to have access to our foremothers, and that we want to revise history,” Walker said.^[26] “Every time a woman is denied the full weight of what she has achieved, it is a loss for all of us,” Walker said.^[27]

Women and textiles[]

Looking for ways women created and produced knowledge and influence outside the traditional narrative, Walker studies the history of women and textiles. Textile production has historically been a trade associated with women. New translations of Bronze Age texts reveal women were central to global trade since antiquity––not only in manufacturing cloth but in running textile empires. Ancient women owned wealth and property independently of their husbands. However, their work was not considered “professional” because it was done inside the home. Walker researches women's global influence in the textile trade during the Bronze Age through the Medieval period.^[28]

Books and publication history[]

As author[]

• Rational Passions: Women and Scholarship in Britain, 1702–1870, A Reader (with Felicia Gordon, University of Toronto Press, 2008); ISBN 978-1551116433
• Mary Hays: The Growth of a Woman's Mind (Ashgate, 2006); ISBN 978-0754640615
• Everywoman (with Virginia Tiger, edited by Toni Morrison, Random House, 1978)

As editor[]

• Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism (with Mary Spongberg, Routledge, 2019); ISBN 0-3671-7869-9
• Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays’s Female Biography; or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries, 6 vols. (as editor, Pickering & Chatto, 2013, 2014); ISBN 978-1848936003
• The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays’s Reader (as editor, Broadview Press, 2006); ISBN 978-1551115597
• William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (as editor with Pamela Clemit, Broadview Press, 2001); ISBN 978-1551112596
• The Feminist Controversy in England: 1788–1810 (1974, Garland Publishing Company). 44 works in 89 volumes by and about women with new introductions that proposed a new female canon for scholarly investigation.

Noteworthy scholarly contributions[]

• "The Invention of Female Biography," Enlightenment and Dissent, (2014)
• "Women's Voices," Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s (2011)
• "Intellectual Exchanges: Women and Rational Dissent," a special issue of Enlightenment and Dissent (2011)

References[]

External links[]

• Gina Walker webpage