Women's history scholars Susan Goodier, Ph.D., and Karen Pastorello, Ph.D., will speak at Niagara University this Friday about the research that culminated in their book, "Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State."
The free, public event takes place at 5 p.m. April 20 in St. Vincent's Hall, rooms 405-406.
"Women Will Vote" celebrates the 2017 centenary of women's right to full suffrage in New York state. Goodier and Pastorello highlight the activism of rural, urban, African-American, Jewish, immigrant and European American women, as well as male suffragists, both upstate and downstate, that led to the positive outcome of the 1917 referendum. The authors argue the popular nature of the women's suffrage movement in New York and the resounding success of the referendum at the polls relaunched suffrage as a national issue, suggesting that, if women had failed to gain the vote in New York, there is good reason to believe the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment would have been delayed.
Goodier is a public scholar for Humanities New York, teaches history at SUNY Oneonta, and serves as an editor for the New York History journal. She also authored "No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement" in 2013.
Pastorello chairs the women's studies department at Tompkins Cortland Community College (Dryden). Her past works include "The Progressives: Activism and Reform in American Society, 1893-1917," and "A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America."
Friday's talk is the final installment of a yearlong speaker series at NU, titled "Niagara University Celebrates the New York State Suffrage Centennial." Previous speakers addressed Alice Paul and the suffrage militants, African-American women in the age of suffrage, and the influence of Haudenosaunee women on the early New York suffragists.
Sponsors of the series include the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area, the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center and Niagara University's Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Sciences, Improvement of Teaching Fund, women's studies program and history department.
