Saturday, October 19th @ 10 AM
Join the Alice Paul Institute on Saturday, October 19th for a Halloween edition of Family Saturday. Paulsdale will be open for free self-guided tours and spooky crafts from 10 AM – 3 PM.
Come by Paulsdale at 1 PM for “Witches: Women of Healing and Wisdom” with Dr. Michele Tarter. This family-friendly talk with present a brief historical overview of witches and witchcraft that spans several centuries and cultures. Dr. Tarter will explore how these earliest women healers were perceived as dangerous and were persecuted for their knowledge and power. She will trace the witch figure’s impact on our own contemporary culture, looking at influential characters ranging from fairy tales to Disney and film.
Michele Lise Tarter, Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, has published numerous articles on early American Quaker women, and has co-edited three book collections: A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2001); Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2012); and New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current book project is about the memoir-writing program she established in 2001 in New Jersey’s only maximum-security prison for women. Many of Dr. Tarter’s courses at TCNJ are cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies, including her popular “Witch in Literature” class. She has been giving her annual “Witch Lecture” to campuses nationwide every October since 1997.