Jean Humez

Professor Jean Humez taught in the UMB Women’s Studies Program from 1975 through her retirement in 2008, chairing the Department from 1998 through 2008. Her research and writing has been largely concerned with the social, political and cultural history of U.S. women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on how women with little or no access to literacy in the past, including notable African Americans, nevertheless were able to make significant marks on this history, often through religious experience, testimonial and leadership. She has published many articles on these questions, as well as three books: Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Mother’s First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).  She is currently at work on a project concerning Pauli Murray’s later (post-memoir) years, as documented in the Pauli Murray correspondence in the Schlesinger Library. With co-author Gail Dines of Wheelock College, she has also produced Gender, Race and Class in Media (Sage Publications, fourth edition 2014), a text reader aimed at helping students learn how to analyze mass media representations.