The American Dream for women meant a better life not just for them, but for their children. A Rutgers–Camden Women's History Month lecture will address how beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially in the early twentieth, women were important to the recognition of children's rights in the U.S. and around the world.

"I plan to talk about some of these women and the links between child welfare and women's activism," says Rutgers–Camden Arts and Sciences Dean Kriste Lindenmeyer about her upcoming lecture at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 8. Titled "Women, Children, and the American Dream: A Historian's Perspective," Lindenmeyer's talk serves as both Rutgers s–Camden's keynote address for Women's History Month and will precede history students' induction into Phi Alpha Theta.

According to Lindenmeyer, the American Dream is about having the opportunity for each generation to attain economic security. "It has never been a universal reality, but it is an ideal that Americans value as important for the nation's identity," she says. While women have gained greater equality over the decades, the Rutgers–Camden historian points out that greater access to the American Dream has yet to be fully achieved.

"I plan to show the limitations of progress for both women and children in a nation that seems to be returning to the lack of social mobility more familiar in the Gilded Age," she notes. Celebrating women's history in March is a start, but a more diverse understanding of our past is badly needed. "We tend to recognize women's contributions on the same scale as men. In other words, the 'great men' of the past are mirrored in the historical recognition of the 'great women' of the past," Lindenmeyer adds. "The value of history should be much broader. Recognizing diversity on all levels in today's society will also help us to value a more diverse set of contributors from the past, and vice versa." 

The author of the books The Greatest Generation Grows Up:  Childhood in 1930s America (Ivan R. Dee, 2005) and ‘A Right to Childhood’: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946 (University of Illinois Press, 1997), as well as co-editor with Andrew Kersten for Politics and Progress: American Society and the State Since 1865 (Praeger, 2001), Lindenmeyer is the editor of the anthology Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History (Scholarly Resources, 2000).  Her research appears in leading journals, including the Journal of American History and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.

This event will take place in Conference Room South ABC of the Campus Center, located on Third Street, between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge on the Rutgers–Camden Campus.