By Mike Greife,
September 8, 2017
WARRENSBURG, MO – The University of Central Missouri will host Cathleen Cahill, associate
professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and distinguished lecturer for
the Organization of American Historians, as she presents Who Fought for Women’s Suffrage:
A More Diverse View at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 20, in Elliott Student Union 240.
Cahill’s lecture commemorates the centennial of the women’s suffrage movement in America
and the historic protests on behalf of the vote for women. The lecture is part of
Cahill’s larger project, Joining the Parade: Women of Color Challenge the Mainstream
Suffrage Movement, which investigates the “alternative genealogies of feminism.” She
examines the participation of African American, Indigenous, Chinese American and Hispana
women in the fight for women’s suffrage before and after the 19th amendment.
As a social historian, Cahill focuses on women’s working and political lives. She
examines how identities such as race, nationality, class and age have shaped them
as individuals and studies these movements to reveal women in some interesting roles.
Cahill’s lecture at UCM coincides with the campus celebration of Constitution Week
centered on the theme of “Protests that Changed America.”
“A constitutional guarantee for women’s right to vote emerged as a key demand of the
women’s rights movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” said Sara Brooks
Sundberg, UCM professor of history. “Dr. Cahill’s research complicates the standard
image of that movement, reminding us that it took a plurality of voices in protest
to make the women’s vote a reality.”
Cahill’s lecture is funded by a grant from the Missouri Humanities Council, with additional
support from the UCM Department of History, Sociology and Anthropology and Cross Disciplinary
Studies and the American Democracy project.
