Dr. Lois Rudnick - The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture

Lois Palken Rudnick is professor emerita of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Among her many books are Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds and Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture, both available from the University of New Mexico Press.

The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of
Modern American Culture
Dr. Lois Rudnick
Wednesday, October 24th
4 p.m.
Dane Smith Hall, Room 120
UNM, Albuquerque, NM

Internationally known as a writer, hostess, and patron of the arts of the twentieth century, Mabel
Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) is not known for her experiences with venereal disease, unmentioned in
her four-volume memoir that was published in the 1930s. Making the suppressed portions of Luhan’s
memoirs available for the first time, Lois Rudnick examines Luhan’s life through the lenses of
venereal disease, psychoanalysis, and sexology. She shows us a mover and shaker of the modern world
whose struggles with identity, sexuality, and manic depression speak to the lives of many women of
her era.


Sponsored by
Center for Southwest Research, Center for the Southwest, Department of English Language
and Literature, Department of History, and the Feminist Research Institute