Women of eighteenth-century British America were confined and complexly bound by stays and busks. Join Dr. Cynthia Chin as she discusses busks in early America — flat, stiff, oblong objects that were slipped inside the front of a woman’s stays — and how these small, often overlooked objects were powerful yet private communicative tools of fashionableness, sensuality, sentimentality — and also political statements.

Speaker: Dr. Cynthia E. Chin, Georgetown University