Laura J. Ping

Historian, Writer, Professor

Email:

lping@bellarmine.edu

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I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with a specialization in women and gender.  I am particularly interested in the ways in which appearance was linked to power.

I am an Assistant Professor of U.S. History at Bellarmine University.

I am also the lead scholar of summer program "Martha Washington and the Women of the 18th Century" held at Mount Vernon annually as part of the The George Washington Teacher Institute Summer Residential Program.

My research examines the connections between fashion and politics, particularly in the ways in which the social power of dress shaped gender, class, and racial identities. I am also interested in material and visual culture as evidence for understanding evolving American culture. My book manuscript Beyond Bloomers: Fashioning Change in Nineteenth-Century Dress explores case studies of women who protested unequal gender roles by abandoning fashionable dresses in favor of loose clothing, specifically trousers and modified underwear (popularly known as dress reform).  This book demonstrates that dress reform was more widely accepted when it was adopted for function rather than as a symbol of women’s rights. In striving to achieve gender equality through dress reform, however, this movement excluded minority women for whom fashion was power.

I am also the co-author of Catharine Beecher:  The Complexity of Gender in Nineteenth-Century America, a biography of education reformer Catharine Beecher, which will be published by Routledge in 2023. My article "A Tale of Two Bloomer Costumes: What Mary Stickney's and Meriva Carpenter's Bloomers Reveal about Nineteenth Dress Reform" was published in Dress, the journal of the Costume Society of America, in 2021 and my article entitled “ ‘He May Sneer at the Course We are Pursuing to Gain Justice': Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl and Corresponding about Women's Suffrage” was published in the Summer/Fall 2017 issue of New York History Journal.

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