Schenectady's home for history

Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

POSTPONED Annual Meeting: Why Votes for Women? A Look at the Capital Region’s Woman’s Suffrage Movement

April 17, 2020 @ 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm

THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN POSTPONED FOR LATER IN 2021

Join us for our 2020 Annual Meeting, featuring a talk by Dr. Kori A. Graves, UAlbany Associate Professor of History. Dr. Graves will discuss women’s suffrage in New York.

When women throughout the U.S. won the right to vote in 1920, women in New York had been voting for three years. In 1917, New York State became the first state west of the Mississippi River to grant women the right to vote. Although many people heralded these victories as signs of the nation’s move toward greater equality for some citizens, the battle for women’s suffrage in New York, and across the nation, had been contentious. The question of whether women wanted the rights and responsibilities that came with the vote was central in the woman suffrage struggle. As women on both sides of the debate articulated the reasons they either supported or opposed the question, they revealed other forms of oppression that limited women’s opportunities. In the Capital Region, women on the anti-suffrage side of the debate were often more successful than their pro-suffrage counterparts. Dr. Graves will discuss some of the reasons for this pattern. In many ways, the suffrage debate our region demonstrates how some women related the right to vote with many other rights, and why the anti-suffrage position remained popular even as support for suffrage increased in the U.S.

About Dr. Kori A. Graves

Dr. Kori A. Graves is an Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. A graduate of the Program in Gender and Women’s History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Graves teaches courses that explore gender and women’s history, the history of marriage and family, and histories of the body, beauty and identity politics in the U.S. Her book, A War Born Family:African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War tells the story of the first African Americans who adopted Korean children, and the ways their efforts revealed the contested nature of adoptive family formation across racial and national color lines. Her research and teaching interests explore the significance of political and popular representations of race, nation, and family – with a specific emphasis on the histories of motherhood and transracial adoption. Dr. Graves is also a dedicated teacher who has won awards for teaching excellence.

The SCHS Annual Meeting will be held from 1:30pm-2pm, with the speaker starting at 2pm. Light refreshments will be served. Admission is $5 or FREE for SCHS members. Tickets are available at the door.

Details

Date:
April 17, 2020
Time:
1:30 pm - 4:00 pm