Marsha Gordon will discuss her new book project, Leftover Lady, which utilizes the heretofore neglected life and writings of Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) to explore an understudied part of American cultural history: the legal and cultural status of divorce and its social and personal consequences involving women in the workplace during the first part of the twentieth century.  Parrott spent her entire career depicting divorcees, working women, and single mothers in fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and screenplays, drawing frankly from her own complicated marital life.  Part biography, part cultural, legal, and economic history, Parrott is a long overdue, intriguing, historically relevant, and surprisingly timely subject of study.  

Marsha Gordon is a Professor of Film Studies  in the Department of English.  She is the author, most recently, of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Date: Tuesday, October 17th

Time: 3-4:15pm

Location: Tompkins Hall 123