In this provocative new biography of Eliza Harriot, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s—the Age of the Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: Female Genius.. Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor. This pathbreaking female educator delivered a a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. A conversation with author and Professor Mary Sarah Bilder, Founders Professor of Law at Boston College Law School.