One of the best parts of my new position with the Institute for Women’s Leadership at Marquette is getting the opportunity to meet and work with amazing faculty across campus. Working with our steering committee since last spring, we had planned to have a great conference focusing on suffrage and innovation—how was women’s intellectual empowerment linked to gaining the right to vote; and how the activism behind gaining the vote and then fighting for voting rights is imbued with innovative thinking and acting.
The good news is that the entire conference has gone virtual and our amazing speakers all taped their sessions in August. (You can watch my trailer here.)
This is now available on our incredible website which has all of the speakers, a really cool interactive timeline (with original documents and then discussion questions a teacher can use for class), voting resources, and more.
For ADR, I love the panel I moderated on voting rights and activism
–How the Women of Milwaukee Will Choose the Next President (up on
YouTube here)—I was channeling Jen Reynolds’ A is for Activism here—and talking about how creative thinking is needed in various get out the vote efforts led by women in Milwaukee.
Law professor Kara Swanson, in her talk on
Votes for Inventive Women, is another great talk for class linking intellectual property with the suffrage movement. Or the book talk by my MU colleague Melissa Shew, who upon realizing that none of us were being taught about any women philosophers, is about to publish an entire anthology on Philosophy for Girls—think desk reference for every woman we didn’t learn.
But mostly I’ve enjoyed listening to all of the talks to fill in my own gaps in knowledge—stories about the suffrage movement that I never learned and the involvement of women in the fight for voting rights in the 20th century. Frankly, this past week has only highlighted even further how important voting is and what a crucial role we all can play.
So—please watch, please share with your networks and with your kid’s teachers, please use in class and assign, please discuss, and please do reach out if you want to brainstorm other ideas for how to use this material.
Lastly, we will have two live virtual sessions with interdisciplinary speakers on October 16th at noon and 4 central—you and your class can register on the website for those as well. Thanks!
