Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello will present “The Very Greatest Victory: New York Votes for Women,” based on their co-authored book, Women Will Vote: The New York State Suffrage Movement (Cornell, 2017). They argue that women won the right to vote because they drew on several distinct coalitions of activists – black, rural, urban, elite, radical, and male – to demand and win the right to vote. While the women’s suffrage movement benefited from brilliant leadership, it needed broad-based support to win the right to full political engagement, including the right to vote, and to expand the understanding of what makes a democracy a democracy.
Recently appointed a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Goodier often speaks to audiences about black and white women’s social and political activism. She currently serves as the coordinator for the Upstate New York Women's History Organization (UNYWHO). In 2017 she edited a double issue on New York State women’s suffrage for the New York History journal. The University of Illinois published her first book, "No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement," in 2013. Her most recent book, "Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State" (coauthored with Karen Pastorello; Cornell, 2017) helped mark the centennial of women voting in the state and won an Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). Goodier’s current projects include a biography of Louisa M. Jacobs, the daughter of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and a full-length history of black women in the New York suffrage movement, tentatively entitled “Networks of Activism: Black Women in the New York Suffrage Movement.”
Susan Goodier studies US women’s political and social activism for the period from 1840 to 1920. She earned a master’s degree in Gender History and a doctorate in Public Policy History, with subfields in International Gender and Culture and Black Women’s Studies at the University at Albany. She then completed a second master’s degree in Women’s Studies, focusing on transnational women’s movements. At SUNY Oneonta she teaches courses in Women’s History, Civil War and Reconstruction, New York State History, and Progressivism.
Karen Pastorello recently retired from her position as Chair of Women and Gender Studies and Professor of History at Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY) where she taught for over thirty years. She earned a doctorate in Modern American History from Binghamton University in 2001 with subfields in progressive labor and women’s history. Her publications include: A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (University of Illinois Press, 2008), “The Transfigured Few: Jane Addams, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and Immigrant Women Workers in Chicago, 1905-1915,” in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Theory and Practice, eds. Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy Chmielewski, (University of Illinois Press, 2009), and, with Susan Goodier, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Cornell University Press, 2017). She is dedicated to exploring the historical origins and implications of working women’s labor and political activism in the United States.
This is the kick-off lecture to our 2020 Women’s Suffrage Speaker Series.
The League of Women Voters of the Mid-Hudson Region will be available at the event to register attendees to vote.
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General admission: $10
Discounted admission: $8 (HHS members, seniors, students, active military members, and veterans)
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Sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts.