To celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the University of Rhode Island will highlight the struggles that women faced gaining the right to vote in a new lecture series.
The “Long Rhode to Vote” lecture series is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the University’s gender and women’s studies department, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Honors Program, the Women’s Leadership Council and the Suffrage Centennial Committee and will feature events throughout the semester.
The first lecture in the series, “Suffrage Memorabilia and the Merchandising of the Movement” was held on Sept. 23. Kenneth Florey, a retired English professor from Southern Connecticut State University, showcased his extensive collection of artifacts from the women’s suffrage movement during this lecture.
“He has one of the biggest women’s suffrage memorabilia collection in the United States and he talked about how everything from buttons, ribbons, to games [to] tea sets, how these were used to promote or even sometimes poke fun of women who were trying to gain the right to vote,” Kathleen Mclntyre, a gender and women’s studies professor and co-coordinator of the event, said.
On Oct, 15th at 7 p.m., URI will host a virtual lecture called “How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All.”
This lecture will be hosted by Martha Jones, a history professor at John Hopkins University. Her talk will be based off of her recent book in which she analyzes how the intersectionality of racism and sexism forced black women to fight twice as hard for their voting rights.
“African American women were often intimated — turned away from the vote, either through violence or things like literacy tests and poll taxes,” said McIntyre. “Ida B. Wells kept saying over and over again, ‘you cannot divorce race from gender in terms of suffrage.’”
An upcoming lecture features Hilary Levey Friedman, president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women.
“[Friedman] draws a link between the ‘votes for women’ sash and the ones worn in beauty pageants,” said Evelyn Stern, another co-coordinator of the event and history professor.
The lecture series was also created in part to celebrate the 150th anniversary for African American men gaining the right to vote. It reflects on the long history of voter suppression that many still face today.
“Even when people had the constitutional right to vote, it didn’t mean that they were actually able to vote,” McIntyre said. “There were barriers; there were obstacles. It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the federal government went into places and actually said you can’t do poll taxes or intimidate people with violence.”
The series hopes to successfully inspire students and attendees to vote in the upcoming election as well.
“The struggle for full access to the vote, not only by women but by Black, immigrant and working-class men, over the course of American history is a powerful and dramatic story,” Stern said. “We hope that learning about this history, and thinking about its contemporary implications, will inspire URI students to realize what a precious right the vote is and to get out and vote this November.”