The Feminine Mystic Conference

The Feminine Mystic: American Prophetesses and the Politics of Religious Experience hosted jointly by Bard College at Simon’s Rock and Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon.

Marking the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York State in 1917, The Feminine Mystic is an interdisciplinary conference exploring the significance of women’s religious authority in American political and cultural contexts from the early republic through the long nineteenth century.

The Shaker experience illuminates the troubled, contingent, and fundamentally disunified idea of an American union in contour and counterpoint, and in prologue to the 19th-century heterodoxies of Mary Baker Eddy, Ellen White, Helena Blavatsky and other women whose political agency took forms of ecstatic prophecy, alternative theology, and visionary epistemology. Diverse in doctrine, these women align in their similar relation to structures of power and strategies for critiquing those structures.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Poet, writer, and feminist icon Eileen Myles will deliver the keynote speech Friday evening at 7pm in the Kellogg Music Hall. Her talk and reading will be free and open to the public.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE AND REGISTRATION
Saturday consists of a series of paper presentations and roundtable discussions between the presenters and on Sunday the conference will travel to the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon.

View the detailed preliminary schedule.

Registration is still open for the conference, including one-day registration.

All meals are included in registration, as well as tickets to “Close Encounters with Music: Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman.” Dormitory-style housing on campus is an extra charge, as noted on the registration form.