Writing Themselves Into History | Kim Bancroft in Conversation with Estelle Freedman

The Stanford Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies invites you to a conversation with author Kim Bancroft and history Professor Estelle Freedman about Bancroft’s new book, Writing Themselves Into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters (Heyday, 2022). Forty years after taking Freedman’s women’s history course, Bancroft reflects on both feminism at Stanford and the history of women in nineteenth-century California.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase through the bookstore at this event

Kim Bancroft

Longtime teacher turned editor and writer, Kim Bancroft earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State University. In 2014 Kim edited Literary Industries, the 1890 autobiography of her great-great-grandfather, California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. She has also written a biography of the founder of Heyday Books, The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Of many other memoirs that Kim has recently helped create, she has edited two of Native friends in the Willits area where she now lives in a cabin in the woods. Kim is also completing a book with a former classmate, David Waddell, Same School, Different Class: A Dual Memoir of School Integration.

Estelle Freedman

Estelle Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor Emerit in United States History, specializes in women's history and feminist studies. A Stanford faculty member since 1976, she is a co-founder of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and recipient of Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Award, Dean's Award, Rhodes Prize, and Kahn-Van Slyke Graduate Mentoring Award. Professor Freedman's books explore women’s prison reform (Their Sisters’ Keepers and Maternal Justice), the history of sexuality in the U.S. (Intimate Matters ), feminism (The Essential Feminist Reader and No Turning Back), and sexual violence (Redefining Rape). She is a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.