Jennifer Scanlon

Jennifer Scanlon is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. A historian with a scholarly focus in U.S. women’s history, Scanlon has published widely and for a variety of audiences. In 2016, Oxford University Press released her most recent book, Until There is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the first and, as a New York Times review stated, “long overdue” biography of civil rights stalwart Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who played a key role in over half a century of social justice initiatives. Hedgeman’s life and work exemplify the links between civil rights, women’s rights, and faith-based activism in what scholars now often refer to as the long civil rights movement.

Scanlon’s last book, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, which explores the working-class roots of Brown’s controversial form of feminism, was named a “Book of the Times” by the New York Times and a business book of the year by American Public Media’s Marketplace, and received significant acclaim in publications ranging from People magazine to the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal.