Jerilyn Fisher, Professor
English Department
Thanks to a Humanities NY Grant, Professor Jerilyn Fisher, Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies, will offer “VOTES FOR WOMEN!”, a four session lunchtime Reading and Discussion series earmarked specially for Continuing Education staff members. The aim is to celebrate the NY Suffrage Centennial (2017-2020) by exploring the dramatic story of conflict and persistence, which finally resulted in women attaining enfranchisement through the passage of the 19th amendment, that most essential constitutional right.
Participants will discuss their responses to short primary sources from the 19th century and chapters from African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded America by Marge Piercy. We will gather context for these texts by watching clips from the PBS documentary, One Woman, One Vote.
During Women’s History Month (Thursday, March 22 AT 12.30-1.45, C391), participants in “Votes for Women!” will be invited to a special performance: On Her Shoulders: Suffragists from the Stage–Bloomers, Booze, Bicycles, and Ballots. The actors will stage a performance piece that is part dynamic history lesson and a tribute to the words and lives of women suffragists in theater who were powerhouses in the mass movement. On Her Shoulders is open to the College community as well.
Two very special guest speakers have been invited to speak during our Reading and Discussion series. Professor Jorge Matos will share the legacy of his extraordinary great great grandmother, Ana Roqué de Duprey, Roqué started the journal La Mujer and was the leading figure Puerto Rico’s women’s suffrage movement—among many other, extrparodinary intellectual accomplishments. Later, we will hear from Ms. Coline Jenkins of the Bronx. She is the great great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the renown suffragist who wrote The Declaration of Sentiments and co-organized the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), both of which were instrumental in lifting the woman suffrage movement into prominence during the 19th century.
Finally, there will be a reception honoring participants in the Humanities NY Reading and Discussion Series, “Votes for Women!”.