Keynotes and Panels
Need a keynote speaker for your conference or writing workshop? Putting together a panel or professional development day? Lindsey is a multi-award-winning author with over 20 years’ experience as a teacher and public speaker. Her programs balance inspiration with information, so that attendees leave feeling both energized and prepared to tackle career and creative challenges in new ways.
New For 2027:
Six Ways to Erase a Woman from History
Throughout history, women’s contributions have been overlooked, overshadowed or outright stolen by men in their fields. In science and engineering, this is known as the Matilda Effect, after 19th century feminist-and-force-of-nature, Matilda Joslyn Gage. But it happens to women in the arts, sports, politics and more, and, while overt, “men getting credit” is only one of six ways that women are routinely erased from the historical record. In this program, we’ll explore disinformation, disguise, self-erasure, and top-secret examples from The Matilda Effect: How 25 Women Were Erased from History. We’ll also give a serious side-eye to the underlying isms: the attitudes and prejudices that make people think it’s OK to dismiss women’s contributions (and women themselves) both in history and in the present day.
Intended Audience: Women’s conferences and professional organizations, Women’s and Gender Studies departments
Listening to the Lost: How to Recover the Stories of Women Erased from History
In 1909, Hertha Ayrton wrote that “An error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.” Misattributed (or stolen) credit is just one form of erasure that women have experienced, throughout history and around the world. To hear their lost voices, researchers much be critical, creative, and too stubborn to quit.
The Matilda Effect: How 25 Women Were Erased from History draws on more than 470 academic books, peer-reviewed articles, historical newspapers, archives, letters and diaries, patent records, and court transcripts. In researching the project, I encountered historians who deciphered 3000-year-old languages, dissected 12th-century “Wikipedia entries,” and dismantled archival silences surrounding 19th-century Black women inventors. This presentation describes how I teased fact from folklore to recover a truer history of Qutulun (ca. 1260-1306), warrior princess of the Mongol Empire. Attendees will receive a checklist for identifying red flags in published accounts of erased women and other people on the fringes of mainstream history.
Intended Audience: writers, librarians, scholars and students in Women’s and Gender Studies departments