When women won passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, they did not win the right to vote—despite repeated claims that they did. Just what, then, did the woman suffrage amendment do? Clarifying this history, this talk also positions 1920 as the middle of a much larger story about the pursuit of voting rights, a struggle that is today unfinished and ongoing.

Join author and historian Lisa Tetrault for an exclusive live-stream presentation and Q&A on the suffrage movement and her new book, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898. This event is co-sponsored by AAUW Harrisburg.

About the Book:

The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War. The founding mythology that coalesced in their speeches and writings--most notably Stanton and Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage--provided younger activists with the vital resource of a usable past for the ongoing struggle, and it helped consolidate Stanton and Anthony's leadership against challenges from the grassroots and rival suffragists.

As Tetrault shows, while this mythology has narrowed our understanding of the early efforts to champion women's rights, the myth of Seneca Falls itself became an influential factor in the suffrage movement. And along the way, its authors amassed the first archive of feminism and literally invented the modern discipline of women's history.

About the Author:

Lisa Tetrault is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, a leading suffrage scholar, and author of the prize-winning book, the Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898.