Susan L. Porter is a research consultant, a lecturer in Museum Studies at the Harvard University Extension School, and a scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center. She is the editor of Women of the Commonwealth: Work, Family, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts and the author of Gendered Benevolence: Orphan Asylums in Antebellum America (forthcoming) and several articles on the history of child welfare, adoption, and work. Porter earned her A.B. at Smith College, her M.A. at the University of Massachusetts, and her Ph.D. at Boston University.