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Karen Fisher Younger is an instructor at Lycoming College. She is currently writing her dissertation on female involvement in the American Colonization Society and will defend her dissertation in the Spring 2006. Younger's dissertation combines her interest in women's history and religion. She argues that colonization supporters persistently tried to blend colonization with patriotism and associate colonization with national identity, and female supporters aided this effort chiefly through their religious activity. Unlike female abolitionists who came to see their oppression mirrored in the experiences of slaves, these women remained committed to a God-ordained hierarchy of class, race and gender that assigned white middle-class women a special role in society. By maintaining a social hierarchy and refusing to identify with African Americans, female colonization supporters helped telescope free people of color into a single monolithic "degraded" condition that consistently represented the African American as permanent strangers, native only to Africa. Perhaps female colonizationist's greatest and most enduring influence is that they helped normalize the foreignness of African American women and men, and contributed to a political environment unwilling to consider a multiracial society or include African Americans in their vision of an American democratic society.
Younger recently received a research fellowship from the Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University, as well as an Andrew W. Mellon research fellowship at the Philadelphia Library Company.
In addition to her work at Lycoming, Younger is an instructor at Pennsylvania School of Technology where she teaches World Civilization and is an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Younger received her bachelor's degree from Trinity College, her master's degree from Northern Illinois, and her master of divinity degree from Gordon-Conwell Seminary. Younger has two children, Olivia and Lily.
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