Martha Vicinus is an American scholar of English literature

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 and Women's Studies

Women's studies

Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...

. She serves as the Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor of English, Women's Studies, and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has written several books about Victorian Women as well as gender and sexuality. She earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1968.

She has been noted for drawing attention to the Victorian double standers that were applied to women and to the Victorian ideal of women without sexual desires. She has argued that society often defines sexuality through a male heterosexual perspective.

In addition to her career as a scholar, she has been active as an advocate of anti-war and LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

causes.