Laura R . Prieto
Harvard Divinity School, Women's Studies in Religion Program, Research Associate and Visiting Professor, 2017-2018
My research interests center on women and gender, especially at the turn of the twentieth century; visual culture; and cultural history. I teach a wide spectrum of undergraduate and graduate courses in American history, gender history, race and ethnicity, the history of sexuality, historical methodology, archives and history, memory studies, and cross-cultural imperialism.
My first book, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Harvard University Press, 2001) studies how women painters, sculptors, and illustrators created a professional identity for themselves in the face of exclusion. I recently wrote a document project for "Women and Social Movements" about nineteenth-century American women sculptors and how they used art to contribute to the abolitionist and women's rights movements.
My primary current research concerns American women, colonized women, and imperialism during the era of the Spanish-American War. I consider the relationship of women nurses, journalists, teachers, missionaries, philanthropists, and activists to the advent of American imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific from 1898 through the 1920s.
I am also at work on a book surveying "Women in America: Issues and Controversies" for classroom use, which combines narrative and analysis with primary source excerpts.
My first book, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Harvard University Press, 2001) studies how women painters, sculptors, and illustrators created a professional identity for themselves in the face of exclusion. I recently wrote a document project for "Women and Social Movements" about nineteenth-century American women sculptors and how they used art to contribute to the abolitionist and women's rights movements.
My primary current research concerns American women, colonized women, and imperialism during the era of the Spanish-American War. I consider the relationship of women nurses, journalists, teachers, missionaries, philanthropists, and activists to the advent of American imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific from 1898 through the 1920s.
I am also at work on a book surveying "Women in America: Issues and Controversies" for classroom use, which combines narrative and analysis with primary source excerpts.
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Journal Articles by Laura R . Prieto
Book Chapters by Laura R . Prieto
Filipinas thus helped to shape missionary work and community even though they rarely appear in official records by name. Reading the mission archives against the grain, this paper seeks to recover at least in part the agency of Filipinas who toured as Bible women, sought advanced education, played inter-mural sports, and wore butterfly sleeves, adapting selected aspects of American womanhood and rejecting others to create their own modern ideal.
In this essay I analyze the relationship the Woman's Board (of the American Board of Commissioners to Foreign Missions) constructed between American women and Filipinas, whom they were "Christianizing, educating, and physically relieving" per the Woman's Boards' Acts of Incorporation. A close consideration of gender in this enterprise reveals tensions within what might seem a cut-and-dried example of missionary imperialism. The Woman's Board was instrumental in creating institutions to empower Filipinas as women and Christians in their own image. Efforts to improve women's lives through clubs, medical care, and formal instruction culminated in the Woman's Bible Training School at Cagayan. The status to which American women hoped to "elevate" Filipinas incorporated a decidedly modern type of womanhood, including professionalized obstetrics and infant care, advanced education and professionalization, and athletics, all alongside Christianity.
Books by Laura R . Prieto
This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s.
Prieto tracks the transformation from female artisans and ladies with genteel "artistic accomplishments" to middle-class professional artists. Domestic spaces and familial metaphors helped legitimate the production of art by women. Expression of sexuality and representation of the nude body, on the other hand, posed problems for these artists. Women artists at first worked within their separate sphere, but by the end of the nineteenth century "New Women" grew increasingly uncomfortable with separatism, wanting ungendered recognition. With the twentieth century came striking attempts to reconcile domestic lives and careers with new expectations; these decades also ruptured the women’s earlier sense of community with amateur women artists in favor of specifically professional allegiances. This study of a diverse group of women artists--diverse in critical reception, geographic location, race, and social background--reveals a forgotten aspect of art history and women’s history.
Other Publications by Laura R . Prieto
As a memorial to Gladys Potter, the Garden seems to have failed almost immediately. Little over a year after the site became a civic space, schoolchildren participating in an Arbor Day essay contest seemed unaware of the place's historical meaning. The winning piece was about the park yet did not even mention the girl for whom it was named. Despite the plaques, the memorial's referrent remains locally forgotten. Neighbors call it the "Baby Park" (because it is so hospitable to even the youngest visitors) or the "Dolphin Park" (in honor of the dolphin statue inside, with its generations of fantastic paint jobs). The mere intent to commemorate does not guarantee that there will be a collective memory of a person or event. Other such lost, forgotten, and eradicated monuments abound throughout the world.
Yet even when cultural memory falters, the playground's physical imprint remains. Just as remembrances are woven into hair jewelry and pasted into family albums, the park's inscription revivifies Gladys's name. In this way it fulfills its intent and leaves a trail for me, the historian, to follow. Indeed, I have found that the park has inspired other remembrances of Gladys Potter from time to time. The power of a local memorial lies in this materiality.
In this essay, I explain how a local collective memory of Gladys Potter failed to take hold, despite her family's best efforts and desires. I address how the materiality of the Garden renders its meanings recoverable, both to academic scholars and to the local community. I trace both the forgetting and the rememberance of Gladys Potter in the use of the Garden through the twentieth century. I argue that it may not have succeeded as a memorial in the strictest sense, but the Garden persists as a form of alternative history, bringing within our reach such "private" concerns as a child's life and a mother's grief. The creation and dedication of the Garden are connected to several historical transformations: the construction of childhood, the City Beautiful movement, and the way Progressive-era women used motherhood as a public role, for example. I demonstrate how the site opens multiple connections to the past, whether one researches it or uses it for its original purpose, a playground to evoke a girl's long-ago pleasure in nature.
Conference Papers by Laura R . Prieto
Talks by Laura R . Prieto
Filipinas thus helped to shape missionary work and community even though they rarely appear in official records by name. Reading the mission archives against the grain, this paper seeks to recover at least in part the agency of Filipinas who toured as Bible women, sought advanced education, played inter-mural sports, and wore butterfly sleeves, adapting selected aspects of American womanhood and rejecting others to create their own modern ideal.
In this essay I analyze the relationship the Woman's Board (of the American Board of Commissioners to Foreign Missions) constructed between American women and Filipinas, whom they were "Christianizing, educating, and physically relieving" per the Woman's Boards' Acts of Incorporation. A close consideration of gender in this enterprise reveals tensions within what might seem a cut-and-dried example of missionary imperialism. The Woman's Board was instrumental in creating institutions to empower Filipinas as women and Christians in their own image. Efforts to improve women's lives through clubs, medical care, and formal instruction culminated in the Woman's Bible Training School at Cagayan. The status to which American women hoped to "elevate" Filipinas incorporated a decidedly modern type of womanhood, including professionalized obstetrics and infant care, advanced education and professionalization, and athletics, all alongside Christianity.
This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s.
Prieto tracks the transformation from female artisans and ladies with genteel "artistic accomplishments" to middle-class professional artists. Domestic spaces and familial metaphors helped legitimate the production of art by women. Expression of sexuality and representation of the nude body, on the other hand, posed problems for these artists. Women artists at first worked within their separate sphere, but by the end of the nineteenth century "New Women" grew increasingly uncomfortable with separatism, wanting ungendered recognition. With the twentieth century came striking attempts to reconcile domestic lives and careers with new expectations; these decades also ruptured the women’s earlier sense of community with amateur women artists in favor of specifically professional allegiances. This study of a diverse group of women artists--diverse in critical reception, geographic location, race, and social background--reveals a forgotten aspect of art history and women’s history.
As a memorial to Gladys Potter, the Garden seems to have failed almost immediately. Little over a year after the site became a civic space, schoolchildren participating in an Arbor Day essay contest seemed unaware of the place's historical meaning. The winning piece was about the park yet did not even mention the girl for whom it was named. Despite the plaques, the memorial's referrent remains locally forgotten. Neighbors call it the "Baby Park" (because it is so hospitable to even the youngest visitors) or the "Dolphin Park" (in honor of the dolphin statue inside, with its generations of fantastic paint jobs). The mere intent to commemorate does not guarantee that there will be a collective memory of a person or event. Other such lost, forgotten, and eradicated monuments abound throughout the world.
Yet even when cultural memory falters, the playground's physical imprint remains. Just as remembrances are woven into hair jewelry and pasted into family albums, the park's inscription revivifies Gladys's name. In this way it fulfills its intent and leaves a trail for me, the historian, to follow. Indeed, I have found that the park has inspired other remembrances of Gladys Potter from time to time. The power of a local memorial lies in this materiality.
In this essay, I explain how a local collective memory of Gladys Potter failed to take hold, despite her family's best efforts and desires. I address how the materiality of the Garden renders its meanings recoverable, both to academic scholars and to the local community. I trace both the forgetting and the rememberance of Gladys Potter in the use of the Garden through the twentieth century. I argue that it may not have succeeded as a memorial in the strictest sense, but the Garden persists as a form of alternative history, bringing within our reach such "private" concerns as a child's life and a mother's grief. The creation and dedication of the Garden are connected to several historical transformations: the construction of childhood, the City Beautiful movement, and the way Progressive-era women used motherhood as a public role, for example. I demonstrate how the site opens multiple connections to the past, whether one researches it or uses it for its original purpose, a playground to evoke a girl's long-ago pleasure in nature.