POSTPONED: WestportREADS: Lillian Wald At Home: Rochester, Henry Street, Westport and the World

Note to Patrons: With the news from Governor Lamont related to the Coronavirus and meetings or gatherings, the Westport Library has decided to postpone or cancel its in-person programming for the month of March. We are currently in conversation with several of the speakers scheduled for this month to see if it is possible to provide some programs via live streaming on our website. Please check the website regularly for updates on rescheduling of in-person events or for dates and times of livestreamed events.

Lillian Wald is best known as the founder of Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1893.  She was also a nurse and Progressive activist who worked for immigrant and Civil Rights, woman suffrage, public health, and global antimilitarism.  In coordination with the WestportREADS exhibit, history professor Margorie N. Feld will trace the arc of Wald’s career, from her lessons in Rochester, New York to her long and successful public career on Henry Street through to her retirement years in Westport.  Through stories, “Lillian Wald at Home” will illuminate how Wald’s activism drew from her sense of feeling at home with people from across the world.

See the current exhibit, on display through May 13, in the Sheffer Room, "Westport’s Suffragists—Our Neighbors, Our Crusaders: The 19th Amendment Turns 100"

Community Partners: Westport Museum for History & Culture, Westport Young Woman’s League 

Marjorie N. Feld is professor of history at Babson College in Massachusetts, where she teaches courses on U.S. social, gender, and labor history. She is the author of Lillian Wald:  A Biography, which won the 2007-2008 Saul Viener Book Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society, and Nations Divided:  American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid.

Funding for this program is provided in part thanks to Connecticut Humanities, a nonprofit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities which supports cultural and historic organizations that tell the state’s stories, build community and enrich lives.