News Releases

Homemaking & Snowbabies at the North Pole: The Peary Polar Quest Through a Women's Lens

April 11, 2008

Patricia Pierce Erikson, visiting assistant professor in USM’s American and New England Studies graduate program will present a free lecture, “Homemaking & Snowbabies at the North Pole: The Peary Polar Quest Through a Women’s Lens.  The lecture will take place at 7 p.m., Thursday, April 24, in USM’s Glickman Family Library, Portland.  For more information, call 780-4920.

Erikson will reexamine the records of the American quest for the North Pole in the late 19th by focusing on Robert E. Peary's wife, Josephine. Josephine accompanied her husband on seven Arctic exhibitions and published three books, “My Arctic Journal,” “The Snow Baby,” and “Children of the North,” about her experiences. Erikson’s research asks why is the participation of a "proper" Victorian lady in these expeditions important, and how did Josephine's involvement reshape popular representations of the Arctic?

Erikson has returned to Maine after serving as a curator at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of "Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center" (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), a book written collaboratively with Makah museum staff. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Maine Women Writers Collection. Erikson is currently applying a feminist geography approach to the history of American Arctic exploration, specifically to the power relationships involving material culture on the Peary expeditions.

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