Jeannette Estruth in Conversation with Jennifer Burns and Jenni Depew on women libertarians in Silicon Valley

Join the Silicon Valley Archives in welcoming the historian Jeannette Estruth as she discusses her new research on the history of women libertarians in Silicon Valley. Jeannette will be joined in conversation by the Stanford historians Jennifer Burns and Jenni Depew.

Silicon Valley today represents not only a specific location in California but also a larger imaginative vision that shapes economic and social realities. In this powerful conceptual landscape, the libertarian political fantasy emerges as a critical factor of cultural reproduction. In this talk and the conversation that follows, Jeannette Estruth will reveal how the Libertarian Party in Silicon Valley of the 1990s built durable and significant connections between technology firms, media, and the voting public in ways that were deeply rooted in the specific geographies and histories of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. 

This political moment in Silicon Valley rehearsed a powerful political script that combined technology, the free market, sexuality, gender, anti-statism, and electoral politics. Estruth argues that Santa Clara and San Mateo counties’ local Libertarian Parties were crucial to Silicon Valley’s libertarianism, and to its political development as a technology hub, a financial center, and a site of production for a powerful vision of the future. By turning back to the 1990s, we can learn much about the world we live in today. 

Jeannette Estruth is an assistant professor of history at Santa Clara University. Her writing has appeared in venues ranging from the Washington Post to the Business History Review. She is completing her book manuscript, Think Different: Silicon Valley Activism and the Making of Modern American Politics, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.

Jennifer Burns is a professor of history at Stanford University. She is a historian of the twentieth century United States working at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history, with a particular interest in ideas about the state, markets, and capitalism and how these play out in policy and politics. Her most recent book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, is the first full biography of the influential economist and political figure. It was awarded the 2025 Reagan Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Hayek Prize. She has published articles about the history of conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism in a number of academic and popular journals, including Reviews in American History, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of Cultural Economy, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Dissent.   

Jenni Depew is a PhD student in history at Stanford University. She studies the history of American political thought and development from the 18th to 21st centuries. She has previously published work on the role of the U.S. Presidency in regards to civil rights, third parties in the 19th century, and Indigenous food sovereignty in her home state of Wisconsin. Her most recent work focuses on the history of libertarianism. Jennifer is also a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, JD student at Stanford Law School, and former graduate research assistant at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO).