'Women’s Rights and the Post-Civil War World' public talk, workshop Sept. 20-21

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — "Women’s Rights and the Post-Civil War World," a public talk and workshop, will take place Sept. 20 and 21 at Penn State University Park. Marking the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women’s suffrage in the United States, this event shifts our focus to a broad range of women’s rights activism that emerged in post-Civil War society. Often eclipsed by the suffrage movement, these postbellum rights movements demanded social, political, and legal equality for women.

Tera Hunter, Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University, will deliver a keynote address, “‘Confronted by Both a Woman Question and a Race Problem’: African American Women, Slavery, and Post-Civil War Rights,” at 5 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 20 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium. Her talk is free and open to the public.

The following day’s workshop will feature visiting scholars Charlene J. Fletcher, Indiana University; Tiffany Hale, Columbia University; Kimberly A. Reilly, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay; Lauren McIvor Thompson, Georgia State University College of Law; and Felicity Turner, Georgia Southern University. They will present works in progress that collectively seek to spur new thinking about how we might narrate the complex expansion in women’s claims upon dignity and equality following the Civil War. More information is available on the Women’s Rights and the Post-Civil War World webpage.

The workshop will begin at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21, in Boardroom I at The Nittany Lion Inn. Advance registration is required to attend the workshop. To register, email Barby Singer at bqs6@psu.edu by noon on Friday, Sept. 13.

"Women’s Rights and the Post-Civil War World" is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies; the Africana Research Center; the Department of History; the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Penn State University Libraries.