Elaine Hedges papers (MS.2011.007)

Biographical / Historical

Elaine Ryan Hedges was born in Yonkers, New York on August 17, 1927. She lived in Baltimore, Maryland, beginning in the late 1960s until her death on June 5, 1997. She was married in 1956 to William Hedges, a college professor, and had two children: daughter, Marietta Hedges, and son, James Leonard Hedges

Hedges graduated from Barnard College in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies. She received a master's degree (1950) and a doctorate degree (1970) in American Studies from Harvard University. Her doctoral thesis was on the author and literary critic William Dean Howells.

From 1951 to 1971, Hedges taught at Harvard University, Wellesley College in Massachusetts, San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. From 1972 until her retirement in 1995, she was a professor of American Literature at Towson State University in Towson, Maryland. Hedges was a member of the American Association of University Professors, the National Women's Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Association of University Professors, the American Studies Association, and the American Literature Association. She cofounded and was president of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society. Hedges was also a founder, and then director (for 20 years), of the Department of Women's Studies at Towson State University. Largely through her pioneering efforts, the Women's Studies Program at Towson University developed into one of the exemplary women's studies programs in the nation. In the 1990s she helped establish Towson University's National Center for Curriculum Transformation Resources on Women in order to foster nationwide curricula change and the dissemination of scholarship focused on women and ethnic minorities. She edited many of the Center's publications, and wrote its opening book articulating the Center's mission, called Getting Started: Planning Curriculum Transformation (1997), which became a model for many administrators and faculty wishing to work on developing a more inclusive curriculum. Hedges served as writer, advisor, and editor for The Feminist Press. During her lifelong involvement with the Feminist Press, she was instrumental in getting Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper republished in 1973 for the series, Lost Or Forgotten Treasures Written By Women. Her renowned afterword to that edition is considered one of the founding works of feminist literary criticism. The other important Feminist Press publications that Hedges was involved with were Ripening: Writings of Meridel Leseuer (1982) and Women Working: an Anthology of Stories and Poems (1979), both of which she edited.

Hedges was one of the contributing editors of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, a two-volume text which virtually redefined the canon of American literature in its concerted effort to represent a fuller range of American literary creativity by including works by women and other marginalized groups. She also co-edited a volume of essays by feminist scholars called Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford Press, 1994).

Hedges' interest in women's literature, culture, and creativity evolved into her ground-breaking scholarship on the significance of American women and sewing -- particularly in reference to their quiltmaking in the nineteenth century. She helped to broaden interdisciplinary interest in the then emerging field of women's studies by investigating ways in which women had traditionally expressed themselves within a patriarchal society. Of special note are her original scholarly interpretations of quilts as encoded texts—that is to say, as historical records from which crucial information about the emotional, intellectual, political, and social lives of women could be gleaned. Her many works on American women and quiltmaking include an essay entitled "Quilts and Women's Culture" in In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (Feminist Press, 1980), which she co-edited with Ingrid Wendt; and "The 19th Century Diarist and her Quilts" published in American Quilts: A Handmade Legacy (Oakland Museum, 1981). She also wrote the text for the book, Hearts and Hands: The Influence of Women and Quilts on American Society (originally published by Quilt Digest Press, 1987), which was subsequently made into a PBS documentary film.