When James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wen-Dell Holmes, and two hundred other prominent American Literary and intellectual figures joined efforts to bring Amelia Edwards to the United States for a public lecture tour in 1889-90, they were acknowledging her importance as a writer and educator. The author of novels, short stories, popular histories, and works of travel literature, Edwards had established a second career as an advocate for the new science of Egyptology. As cofounder of and secretary for the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882, Edwards wrote extensively for the Morning Post and the Academy in England and Harper's in the United States. By 1887, she had established a strong working relationship with William Copley Winslow of the Boston Museum and received honorary degrees from Smith College and Columbia College for her literary and scholarly achievements. By the time of her tour, Edwards had succeeded in fostering a new understanding of a culture more ancient and exotic than those of Greece and Rome. Audiences for her lectures in both England and America were thus prepared for her to illuminate the Egyptian past, but listeners to this lecture on the social and political position of women in ancient Egypt may have been somewhat startled to find shadows from that past cast on their own present.