Votes for Women: A Brief History of Our Right to Vote

January 20       7 PM

On Thursday, January 20, at 7 p.m., Windsor Historical Society and Windsor/North Central League of Women Voters jointly sponsor Votes for Women: a Brief History of Our Right to Vote, a lecture by Dr. Laurel A. Clark, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hartford.  This lecture is held in conjunction with the Windsor/North Central League of Women Voters’ exhibition, Marching in Their Footsteps, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the League and the right of women to vote in the United States on view in the Society’s meeting room through January.

 Dr. Clark will focus on the National Woman’s Movement at three different points in time.  For many of the women at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, property rights and divorce were issues of more concern than suffrage.  In the period following the Civil War, issues of race, gender and immigration as related to suffrage were hotly debated.  Should suffrage be extended to African-American men or to women first?   The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.   In the early 20th century, most working-class women were loyal to and well served by their unions.  At the same time, many middle and upper-class women regarded unions with repugnance.  The challenge for the National Women’s Movement in the three generations between the Seneca Falls Convention and the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment lay in appeasing and appealing to shifting coalitions of women. 

Who supported the women’s movement, who was against it and how they constructed their arguments is a complex and fascinating segment of American history.  Learn more at the lecture, and see how these issues were played out in Connecticut at the Marching in their Footsteps exhibition. Lecture cost is $6 for adults; $5 for students and seniors; and $4 for Windsor Historical Society and League of Women Voter members.