Jennifer W. Reiss is a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellow. Jenny’s dissertation uses gender to rethink how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced in America before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era. It argues that femaleness was inherently disabling in Anglo-American society and thus, gender matters to the conception of impairment in the long eighteenth century. The project seeks to uncover hidden histories of disabled women, but also to question the gendered ways in which we imagine disability in the past.
Q: How did you become interested in your dissertation topic?
Reiss: I have a congenital impairment, but I didn’t grow up with any connection to the disability community or sense of disability history. As a kid, I deeply assimilated disability stigma—which led to my interest in early America.
I falsely imagined early America as a world where I would not have existed. My love of the period grew and over time that initial reasoning got filed somewhere in the back of my subconscious. It was only when I left my first career and came back to grad school that I learned about disability history as a field of study. I was gobsmacked to learn scholars were finding people like me in the very places I had naively imagined compulsory ablebodiedness.
Early on in my doctoral program I started researching Gouverneur Morris, the amputee who was “penman of the Constitution” (he famously wrote the Preamble), in part to see what I could learn about this new field. When it came to thinking about a dissertation topic I was initially hesitant to take on a disability topic though, given my lack of connection to the community. But I was encouraged to keep meeting early Americanists writing on disability, and they were all so welcoming and interesting, and there was so much necessary work still to be done.
Finally, a good friend sat me down and said, “Look, this is why you love what you do in the first place, and it makes the hard work even more meaningful to you, so just do it.” Sometimes now I think of the dissertation as a love letter to my seven-year-old self—showing her that she should love early America not because she couldn’t have been a part of it, but because she could have.
Q: Who are the three scholars who most influenced your own work?
Reiss: Bar none, my dissertation advisor (and McNeil acting director!) Kathy Brown’s fingerprints are all over my work, and not just because she’s an amazing editor and commentator. I was privileged to be a Penn undergraduate (too long ago!), and I took as many classes with Kathy as I could. She really nurtured my love of early America and gender history, and inspired me with her innovative approach to histories of the body (her Foul Bodies remains one of my favorite books ever). She’s also a generous and kind teacher—a great role model for anyone starting out in this field.
I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale for one of those early Kathy classes, and decades later it still sticks with me. I am very cognizant that, in doing women’s history, I’m sitting on the shoulders of really brave women like Ulrich who kept working and searching when others dismissed their scholarship as unimportant or their potential sources as non-existent or useless. My subfield is so young, I often feel like I’m facing similar obstacles. Periodically revisiting the meticulous and insightful way Ulrich resurrects Martha Ballard’s life and work in that monograph encourages me to keep going.
Within disability studies, I really love the writing of the late Tobin Siebers, who developed the concept of “complex embodiment” in disability theory. Complex embodiment embraces the social construction of disability without discounting the reality of corporeal limitations. I find that middle ground a compelling theoretical articulation of my own lived experience and I think about it a lot as I grapple with what it means to be “disabled” in Anglo-America.
Q: If you could see or visit any historical artifact or site, what would it be and why?
Reiss: As I mentioned, I started in disability history by writing on Gouverneur Morris. One of Morris’s prosthetics still exists and is probably the only surviving example produced in eighteenth-century America. It’s in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, but I’ve only seen photos of it! It’s a beautiful piece of equipment, made bespoke by a Philadelphia furniture maker, and sort of puts the lie to the stereotype of early modern “peg” legs. I’d love to see it in person!
Q: Who is an author that you think more early Americanists should read?
Reiss: I think it’s out of print now, but Donna Merwick’s Death of a Notary is a great example of how to do rigorous but compelling history. She explores the stakes of the transition between Dutch and English rule in colonial New York in a way that feels really fresh even twenty-five years after it was published. Like the more recent (and also fabulous) A Sewing Girl’s Tale by John Wood Sweet, Death of Notary tells a good story, and I think as our field is realizing the importance of, and grappling with how to best reach the general public, being able to merge scholarship and captivating storytelling is increasingly essential.
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Reiss: After five years an “interloper” at the McNeil Center it’s so nice to be a proper Fellow! I joke that my favorite part is having an office (which is lovely), but I’m really excited for the upcoming workshops—the fellows’ workshop this Fall and the undergraduate research workshop in the Spring. I love learning about others’ work and ideas, and I find something very moving about this kind of academic exchange—where the ideal is that people come together purely to support one another, to make each other’s scholarship better, and to move knowledge forward.
Jennifer Reiss is a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Read more about her dissertation on her bio page.