Margot Mifflin

Author and Journalist

Margot Mifflin is a freelance journalist and associate professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the Arts and Culture Program. She has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Salon.com, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Ms., ARTnews and many women’s magazines.

Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at nearly two dozen colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Vanderbilt University, Los Angeles MOCA and New York University. She appeared in MSNBC’s documentary, “Women and Tattoo,” which first aired in 2001, and CNN’s “Women of the Ink,” which first aired in 1998. Mifflin has written “Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo.” According to Susan Faludi, “In this provocative work full of intriguing female characters from tattoo history, Margot Mifflin makes a persuasive case for the tattooed woman as an emblem of female self-expression.”

She recently released “The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman.” Olive Oatman was the first tattooed American white woman, who was adopted and raised by Mohave Indians in the 1850s after her family was killed in the Arizona desert as they emigrated west from Illinois. She was ransomed back at age 19 and became the subject of a bestselling biography. She lectured through the mid 1860s, selling books as well as photos of her tattooed face.

Journalist and author Margot Mifflin takes you on a fascinating excursion into a subculture that dates back to the 19th century. Drawing from the research that went into her critically acclaimed book she shows how women's interest in tattoo surged in the suffragist '20s and the feminist '70s. Mifflin discusses:

• Breast Cancer Survivors who tattoo their mastectomy scars as an alternative to reconstructive surgery or prosthetics.

• The parallel rise of tattooing and cosmetic surgery during the '80s, when women tattooists became soul doctors to a nation afflicted with body anxieties.

• Maud Wagner, the first known woman tattooist, who in 1904 traded a date with her tattooist husband-to-be for an apprenticeship.

• Victorian society women who collected tattoos as custom couture, including Winston Churchill's mother who wore a serpent on her wrist.