The post-Civil War world witnessed an explosion of rights demands by a wide range of women—more so than at any other point in U.S. history, yet we have little history of this. Instead, the conventional story focuses on women’s suffrage as the main event, eclipsing the numerous other rights campaigns women launched. This workshop aims to foreground those other rights demands and spur new thinking about how we might narrate this complex expansion in women’s claims upon dignity and equality. 

Lunch will be provided. RSVP to RichardsCenter@psu.edu by Friday, Sept. 13, 12:00 noon.

*Please note: workshop attendees will be required to read participants’ papers in advance of the workshop; you will receive access to the papers when you RSVP.

Program:

9:30-10:00 a.m. 

• Lori Ginzberg, Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Penn State, Welcome and Opening Remarks

10:00-12:00 noon

• Lori Ginzberg, Professor of History and Women’s Studies, Penn State, Session Chair
• Kimberly A. Reilly, Associate Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, To Love, Not Obey: Coverture in the Era of Contract
• Charlene J. Fletcher, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University – Bloomington, Home Ain't Always Where the Heart Is: Women, Confinement, and Domestic Violence in the Gilded Age Bluegrass
• Tiffany Hale, Assistant Professor of Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University, Friendlies: Native American Women During and After Reconstruction

12:00-1:30 p.m.

• Lunch  - Boardroom II, The Nittany Lion Inn

1:30-3:00 p.m.

• Cathleen Cahill, Association Professor History, Penn State, Session Chair
• Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Faculty Fellow, Center for Law, Heath, and Society, Georgia State University College of Law, “Birth Control Lost Out Again”: Suffragists and the Early Birth Control Movement in the United States
• Felicity Turner, Associate Professor of History, Georgia Southern University, To Own What She Knows: Property and the Gendered Language of Rights in the Nineteenth-Century US

3:00-4:00 p.m.

• Lisa Tetrault, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Wrap Up

Conference is free and open to the public. 

Sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center.  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.