The American Revolution disrupted households and family economies, expanding the number of women on their own who encountered shifting material conditions on a daily basis. Drawing on the experiences of two southeastern Pennsylvania widows, Camille Kaszubowski’s talk will illustrate how the Revolutionary War pulled women on their own into complex relationships with governing bodies and required them to adopt a range of strategies to mitigate changes to their personal economies. The stories of Hannah Lewis and Sarah Kennedy allow us to reconsider the Revolution’s legacy for women.

Camille Kaszubowski is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation ‘Left in Distress’: Women on Their Own in Revolutionary Pennsylvania, explores the material conditions of women and their families and examines the strategies that they employed to attempt an economic survival during the war and in its long aftermath. Recently, she held a dissertation research fellowship at the David Library of the American Revolution as well as one supported by the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She also teaches courses in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Camille earned her B.A. at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. from the University of Delaware.

The event will take place on Thursday, May 17, 2018 in Ryder Hall at LancasterHistory.org, 230 N. President Avenue in Lancaster. A speaker’s reception takes place at 4pm, followed by the main presentation at 4:30pm. The event is free and open to the public.