Emily and Matilda Bancroft: Women Writers in Their Own Right
March 21, 2023 | 5:30 pm
In this webinar, presented by the California Historical Society, author Kim Bancroft discusses her new book, Writing Themselves into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Letters and Journals, and presents her work on two ancestors, the first and second wives of historian and collector extraordinaire Hubert Howe Bancroft. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1860s to the 1890s, Emily Ketchum Bancroft and Matilda Griffing Bancroft watched the unfolding of California history. Kim highlights Matilda’s significant involvement in Hubert Howe’s trailblazing research on the history of the American West and her evocative descriptions of travels throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Deeply perceptive chroniclers, these women left behind extensive records of their lives—including experiences with motherhood, illness, community events, and family business—set against the tumultuous backdrop of American social changes. Kim Bancroft pays special attention to the two women’s nuanced portraits of gender, race, and class in the nineteenth-century West.
Register HereAbout the Speaker
Kim Bancroft
Longtime teacher turned editor and writer, Kim Bancroft earned a B.A. in English from Stanford, an M.A. in English and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and a doctorate in education from UC Berkeley. She has taught at high schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, and at Sacramento State. In 2014 Kim edited H.H.B.'s 1890 autobiography, Literary Industries, published by Heyday Books. She also wrote a biography of the founder of Heyday Books, called The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher. Of many other memoirs that Kim has recently helped create, she has edited two of Native friends in the Willits area where she now lives in a cabin in the woods. Kim is also seeking to publish a book she wrote with a former classmate, David Waddell, called Same School, Different Class: A Dual Memoir of School Integration.
