Professor Joanne Passet
Author of Sex Variant Woman:
The Life of Jeannette Edward Foster

Speaking on
"Dr. Kinsey's Librarian - Rediscovering a Lesbian Pioneer"

Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Noon-1:00 p.m.
Kinsey Institute Conference Room,
2nd Floor, Morrison hall

In 1948, Jeannette Edward Foster became the first librarian at the precursor to The Kinsey Institute, The Institute for Sex Research, and contributed to Dr. Kinsey's work on homosexuality. In 1956, she published Sex Variant Women in Literature, a full-length bibliography cataloguing hundreds of female same-sex relationships in literature. The book was controversial at the time, and proved to be a landmark in scholarship into the homosexual experience, and raising awareness of lesbianism generally.

Professor Joanne Passet is the author of a new biography of this fascinating woman - Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Edward Foster. Dr. Passet is a Professor of History at Indiana University East, and has also taught in the School of Library and Information Science, and the Women's and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of several books on American women's history and topics in library science.