Meet Elizabeth DeWolfe

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elizabeth DeWolfe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elizabeth below.

Elizabeth, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

I took a wandering path that led me to the right place at the right time. I started as a geology major in college but found my way into anthropology, art history, and astronomy. I wasn’t sure what I’d do for a living. After college, I traveled, I lived abroad, I earned a Master’s degree, and then I worked in the museum field. I wrote exhibit labels and explanatory texts—telling the stories of artworks and artifacts that often were created by, owned by, or featured women.

I hadn’t thought much about women’s lives. But when I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I was intrigued by the book’s epilogue, where future historians debate Offred’s story. That got me thinking about how women’s lives are often obscured in history—despite studying past cultures, I didn’t know much about how women lived. I decided to return to school for my PhD, and it was right then, in the 1980s and early 1990s, that women’s history became a field of study. My high school history classes focused on great men and big wars—topics that had little interest to me, and it had never occurred to me at that young age to become a historian. Still, by the time I entered the American and New England Studies program at Boston University, the discipline was shifting, and historians took the study of women’s everyday life seriously. Ordinary women. Like me.

I had found a focus: women’s stories . . . from the infamous to the ordinary. These stories matter. Living your ordinary, daily life IS history. It’s not that women did not contribute to history; the traditional gatekeepers’ definition of history was far too narrow. What constitutes “history” has now grown to include all those whose stories were untold: the working class, immigrants, people of color, those with disabilities, and all those previously without a voice in the historical record. It’s my passion and privilege to recover and tell those stories as an author and professor.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m privileged to tell ordinary women’s extraordinary stories in the classroom and in my writing. As a history professor, I love introducing students to women’s history and challenging them to think about why women’s lives are obscured in the historical record and in what nooks and crannies we can look to bring their lives into the light. A highlight of my career at the University of New England (Biddeford, Maine) has been co-founding the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program. Now in its twentieth year, the program has given young people the knowledge, skills, and experience to understand our past and to use that knowledge to navigate our complex present and give voice to change.

As much as I love teaching, my current passion is research and writing. I can spend hours reading scratchy handwriting in dim archives or squinting at census records chasing an obscure person. I’ve written about a woman who joined and left the religious society known as Shakers. When she was denied a divorce and custody of her children in 1815, she fought for decades for what she called “the just rights of women.” At a local antiquarian bookstore, I stumbled on the 1849 account of a textile mill worker who became pregnant out of wedlock. When she died following an abortion, her death was deemed a reason young women should stay out of the workforce. My current project researched the 1890s tale of a US congressman and his mistress who had sued him for “breach of promise” for failing to marry her. The biggest surprise came when I discovered that to help win the lawsuit, the congressman had hired an undercover detective known as “Agnes.” Agnes became his mistress’ fake friend and passed the secrets she had learned in heart-to-heart talks to the congressman’s lawyer. In her day, no one ever discovered her real identity. And when her mission was over, Agnes was forgotten in history . . . until I found her faint footsteps in an archival folder. My forthcoming book (April 2025), Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, tells the story of her incredible mission of spying on the most famous American woman of 1894.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Curiosity led me to explore many subjects as a college student and in my personal life. A breadth of knowledge and interests served me well in the museum world and later in academia. While a graduate student, I taught as an adjunct at a local college. My supervisor encouraged me to narrow my interests and become the singular expert on one specific thing. But that’s not how my brain works, and when I started to look for a full-time teaching job, I was hired in the position I still hold precisely because I had training in multiple areas. Pulling insights from history, literature, anthropology, and other fields enlivens my teaching and keeps me engaged as I encounter new ideas I’m excited to share with my students.

Along with curiosity, be flexible in your life’s path and open to the unexpected: the general education course you have to take, the novel you pick up at the library, or a random conversation on an airplane might be the spark that changes your life. I used to worry about not following a straight path, but now I feel fortunate to have encountered diverse experiences, ideas, and knowledge. You never know when they will come in handy. As I tell my students, when opportunity knocks, you have to know how to open the door. Fill your life’s toolbox so you can turn that doorknob.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

The recent presidential election cycle was challenging to me in witnessing rampant misogyny: dismissing women’s expertise, defining their personal experiences as false, and criticizing their morals, virtue, appearance, and even the sound of their voices. As a historian, it is frustrating and frightening to know that in 1849 Berengera Caswell, about whom I wrote in The Murder of Mary Bean, had more reproductive rights than many women in twenty-first-century America. It’s horrifying to see insults about “nasty women,” women “screeching,” and “childless cat ladies” (the latter includes me) and know that these stereotypes are deeply embedded tropes about “dangerous” women that harken back to the European witch hunts of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It’s appalling to hear pundits state that America is “not ready” for a female leader while developed nations around the world have done so for decades (and, in some cases, centuries). As a woman, I am frustrated, dismayed, disappointed, and angry, and it is a challenge not to feel powerless and hopeless. But as a historian, I know it’s a long game. It was 72 years from the first Women’s Rights Convention to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and women persisted: they marched down city streets, picketed outside the White House, held parades in the nation’s capital, and endured jeering, public shaming, jail, and physical punishment that today we call torture. It’s hard to stand in front of a room of eighteen-year-olds and tell them it will get better. It’s hard to know that some dismiss my life’s work as “not real history.” It’s hard to realize that I may not see that last glass ceiling shattered in my lifetime. But I also know, as a woman historian and a historian of women, that we can’t go back to the past–we can only move ahead into the future. To meet this challenge, I am resolved to continue recovering women’s voices from the past and to amplify the voices of the present.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.elizabethdewolfe.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethdewolfe/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethDeWolfeAuthor/
• Other: Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781985902244/alias-agnes/The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2010/the-murder-of-mary-bean-and-other-stories/