2018 Fall Author Series - Elizabeth F. Fideler

Elizabeth F. Fideler
 
Join us Thursday, October 18 from 7:30-9:00 to hear author Elizabeth F. Fideler discuss her latest work, Margaret Pearmain Welch (1893-1984): Proper Bostonian, Activist, Pacifist, Reformer, Preservationist (December 2017, Wipf and Stock). Ms. Fideler (EdD, Harvard University) is a Research Fellow at Boston College’s Center on Aging and Work. In addition to the biography of Margaret Pearmain Welch, she is the author of Women Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and On the Job (2012) and Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and On the Job (2014). She is a longtime trustee of the Framingham Public Library and chairs the library’s “one book, one community” initiative, Framingham Reads Together.
 
Summary of the Book
 
In a bygone era when twentieth-century Proper Bostonians mixed Beacon Hill formalities with countryside pleasures, Margaret Pearmain Welch (1893–1984) defied the mores of her social set and got away with it. She was the epitome of everything expected and much that was scandalous. Known as a debutante, dancer, world traveler, and hostess, she was also an indefatigable activist, writer, lecturer, lobbyist, fundraiser, and opinion shaper—grande dame as well as proverbial little old lady in combat boots (footwear more appropriate to confrontation than tennis shoes). A descendant of seventeenth-century dissenter Anne Hutchinson and just as independent, she embraced Quaker ideals of religious tolerance, conscientious objection, and civil liberties, as well as worship without the benefit of clergy. Margaret was the quintessential socialite who established Waltz Evenings in her Louisburg Square drawing room and also the beauty whose marriages and divorces caused ostracism. At the same time, she worked tirelessly on women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, world peace, environmental protection, monetary reform, land conservation, and more. As the indomitable matriarch of an extended family and chronicler of its history, her efforts at self-fashioning produced a unique persona, blending insistence on proprieties with a keen awareness of twentieth-century social, cultural, political, and economic shifts.
 
Publisher
 
Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
 
ISBN
 
9781532636905
 
Retail Price
 
$24 — $20 author special at the event!
 
Date of Publication
 
December 14, 2017