Lois W. Banner, a noted author and University of Southern California professor, will speak at a Women’s History Month program at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 18, at California State University, Fresno.
Banner’s lecture, sponsored by the College of Social Sciences and the Departments of
Anthropology, History and Women’s Studies, is free and open to the public. It will be held in University Center, room 200.
Banner is a professor of history and gender studies at USC. Her lecture will focus on her newest book, “Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle,” which was released in fall 2003.
A prolific author, Banner’s books include “Women in Modern America,” “Clio’s Consciousness Raised,” “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” “American Beauty,” “In Full Flower” and “Finding Fran.”
Her latest book examines the lives of Mead and Benedict, two of America’s most eminent women intellectuals in the 20th century.
Banner was born and raised in Los Angeles where she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Los Angeles. She earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York City.
Banner said: “I wanted with “Intertwined Lives” to examine these two women born
almost a generation apart in the context of a large circle of influences from families, friends, husbands, lovers, colleagues — and the calamitous history of their times: from the late Victorian era to word War I and the sexual revolution of the 1920s from the Great Depression through World War II and the deepening conservatism of the post¬war years.”
Author Christine Stansell wrote about the book: “Intertwined Lives is an enticing and gorgeous adventure story about two brilliant divas, whose intellectual travels also involved extraordinary experiments in friendship and sexual love. Banner’s approach to these amazing women is both erudite and wonderfully imaginative.”
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