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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY > People > Lisa Tetrault

Lisa Tetrault

Associate Professor
Ph.D.: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004
Department Member Since: 2005

Biography

Professor Tetrault specializes in the history of U.S. women. Her research and teaching interests focus on the nineteenth-century, the history of political economy, the history of social movements (particularly feminism), women’s health, and the politics of memory. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of History and taught previously at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, NY.

Professor Tetrault is currently working on her forthcoming book uncovering the politics behind the manufacture of an origins myth for feminism, namely the story of Seneca Falls. Typically, the beginning of a women’s rights movement in the United States is dated to 1848, to the first women’s rights meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. This origins story, however, did not become commonplace until much later, a story not told during the antebellum period, but a story created in response to Reconstruction-era politics, some forty to fifty years after the fact, with broad-reaching implications for the direction of the movement. The manuscript is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press for the Gender and American Culture Series and is provisionally titled Memory of a Movement: Woman Suffrage and the Creation of a Feminist Origins Myth, 1865-1900.

Professor Tetrault has received long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Newberry Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. The American Historical Association and the Library of Congress awarded her the 2007 J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship, then given for the most promising book by a young historian. She has also received funding from the Huntington Library, the Schlesinger Library, the Sophia Smith Collection, and many others.

selected Publications

Lisa Tetrault, “Purists vs. Pragmatists,” book review of Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Penn, 2011) & Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (UNC, 2011), in Women’s Review of Books (May/June 2012).
Lisa Tetrault, “The Incorporation of American Feminism: Suffragists on the Post-Bellum Lyceum,” Journal of American History 96:4 (March 2010).
Lisa Tetrault, Memory of a Movement: Woman Suffrage and the Creation of a Feminist Origins Myth, 1865-1900 (under contract, University of North Carolina Press).
Lisa Tetrault, “A Paper Trail: Piecing Together the Life of Phebe Hanaford,” Historic Nantucket 51:4 (Fall 2002)
Lisa Tetrault, “Rock and Roll,” “Yellow Journalism,” & “Women, Citizenship of Married,” encyclopedia entries in Dictionary of American History, 3rd. edition, Stanley I. Kutler, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2002)
Lisa Tetrault, book review of Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), in Law and History Review 20:2 (Summer 2002)

Courses Taught

Body Politics: Women and Health in America
Women, Politics, and Protest: Women’s Rights Movements in the U.S.
Women in America: A women’s history survey
Development of American Culture
The Civil War Era, 1848-1877
U.S. Pro-Seminar (graduate course)

Contact Info

Department of History
Baker Hall 252
P: 412.268.4440
F: 412.268.1019
tetrault@cmu.edu

Publications