"Shattering the Silence: Jeannette Howard Foster and the Writing of Sex Variant Women in Literature" Joanne Passet, PhD

Jeannette Howard Foster (1895-1981) was raised in Illinois and gained a PhD at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. For four years in the 1950s she managed the collections of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, where she worked with Alfred Kinsey. Eventually she left to publish her own work. In In 1956, she produced Sex Variant Women in Literature, a bibliographic essay that discusses literary accounts of lesbian love from the ancient Greeks though modern times. In the book received a 1974 ALA Stonewall Book Award, and today is considered one of the most important works about lesbian literature.

Joanne Passet is a professor of US history at Indiana University East, and author of Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster (Da Capo. 2008). Her previous books include Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (U. Illinois, 2003), Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900-1917 (U. New Mexico Press, 1994), and (with Mary Niles Maack) Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment (Greenwood,1994). She formerly taught in the graduate programs of library and information science at Indiana University Bloomington, Dominican University , and University of California, Los Angeles. A graduate of the women's history program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she serves on the executive board of the Indiana Women's History Association.

Co-sponsored by the University Lectures Committee, the School of Library and Information Science, the University Libraries, the LGBT Campus Center, and departments of History and Communication Arts.