Connect260: A Woman’s House in a Man’s World

In a world where Eliza Jumel had the odds stacked against her in every respect (socially, financially, and more), she actualized the reality she wanted for herself. Eliza, like many other women of her time, was a woman who rebelled against the patriarchal structure of the society she lived in. Join Mansion staff and Margaret Oppenheimer, Eliza Jumel’s biographer, to discuss what it would have been like to be Eliza Jumel and how she navigated the constraints of her early years and gender norms to write her own story. She will also compare Eliza’s tactics to some of those of her Black and white contemporaries.

This session of Connect260 will focus on highlighted themes and stories from the exhibition “What the House Saw: 260 Years of Stories from the Morris Jumel Collection and Community’s section on the Antebellum Era.

About Margaret Oppenheimer: Margaret A. Oppenheimer is the author of The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic. A writer and editor, she holds a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Besides her biography of Jumel, Oppenheimer has written numerous articles on the fine and decorative arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and authored an exhibition catalogue, The French Portrait: Revolution to Restoration.

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