Celebrate Women’s History Month

March 1, 2021 7:00pm (Central) via Zoom*

Professor Melanie Beals Goan
(University of Kentucky)

“A Wedding Ring on Her Finger and a Ballot in Her Hand”:
Western Kentucky and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage

In 1879, Owensboro became one of the very first places in Kentucky to consider the woman suffrage question. It was a promising beginning, but slow and intermittent progress followed. Suffrage was never just about the vote alone. Political rights intersected with many other issues, including temperance and racial equality.

This lecture will explain why suffrage struggled to gain support in western Kentucky, and it will highlight some of the men and women who worked to make “Votes for Women” a reality.

Biography
Professor Goan is a specialist in twentieth century US history, with specific interests in gender, Appalachia/Kentucky, and medical history. Her first book Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing Service and Rural Health in Appalachia (University of North Carolina Press), was published in 2008. The University Press of Kentucky will publish her second book, A Simple Justice: Kentucky Women Fight for the Vote, in November 2020. Dr. Goan is working closely with the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Project (see https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/pages/91162/kentucky-woman-suffrage-project ) to help mark the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment.

*Email us at aauw@owensboro@gmail.com for the Zoom link.