Recasting the Vote: Native American Activism, Past and Present

While we think we know the story of women’s suffrage in the United States, new…
Read more
Date
Thu, November 19
Time
7:00 pm
Recasting the vote

Event Details

Date
November 19, 2020
Time
7:00 pm
Presented By
Delaware Historical Society
Event Type

Buy Tickets

Event Website

Description

While we think we know the story of women’s suffrage in the United States, new research illustrates that the fight for women’s voting rights is a much richer story. A truly diverse group of women from Chinatown, Native American reservations, African American clubs, and Spanish-speakers in New Mexico worked for more than 40 years to build a movement that would eventually include all women. In Recasting the Vote, author Dr. Cathleen D. Cahill recounts the actions of a multiracial group who pushed the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights, which remains an unfinished struggle that extends into the 21st century.

Dr. Cahill will be joined by Jessica Renae Locklear for a conversation about 20th century Philadelphia-area native histories and communities’ issues of concern.

Cathleen D. Cahill, an associate professor of History at Penn State University, is the author of Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (University of North Carolina Press 2020). Her first book, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (UNC 2011), won the Labriola Center for American Indian National Book Award and was finalist for the David J. Weber and Bill Clements Book Prize. She is also steering committee chair for the Coalition for Western Women’s History.

Jessica R. Locklear is a PhD student in the department of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jessica graduated from Temple University in May 2020, where she studied public history. Her master’s thesis documents the history of Lumbee migrations to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the twentieth century and the community that was established there. Jessica started an oral history project that documents Lumbee and other American Indian experiences in Greater Philadelphia. These interviews are housed at the Southern Oral History Program at UNC, where she now works as a field scholar.