CROW (Current Reserach on Women and Gender) Forum

Dr. Danielle Dick McGeough presents Pots and Purity: Performing the Domestic Goddess in the 19th Century at the CROW Forum on November 3, 2014 at 12pm in the UNI Center for Multicultural Education, room 109A. In this presentation, Dr. McGeough considers the relationship between women and toilets, and the significance of this relationship in the nineteenth century U.S. home. By going backstage in the nineteenth century home, she observes the Domestic Goddess filling the commode with dry and sifted earth, collecting raw material for compost, and, caring for children ill with diarrhea. Backstage performances of domesticity tell a story of a woman covered in soil and smelling of sweat as she shovels the daily fourteen pounds of earth into the earth-closet in an effort to temper effluvium and manage family waste. By foregrounding the earth-closet and women’s practices with it, McGeough offers a corporeal history of the Domestic Goddess as a counter-archive to official histories of domesticity

This event is free and everyone is welcome. Sponsored by the UNI Women’s and Gender Studies program (www.uni.edu/womenstudies).