According to officials, working-class women brought a distinct style and perspective to women’s long struggle for the right to vote.
Officials with the Alice Paul Institute (API) say the institute is excited to host Lara Vapnek on Saturday, March 9, for a talk entitled “For the Work of a Day, We Want Something to Say: Social Class and Suffrage.”
API officials say Vapnek’s presentation “illuminates the substantial role” played by working-class women in the fight for equal rights.
According to officials, working-class women brought a distinct style and perspective to women’s long struggle for the right to vote.
With that in mind, officials say the talk will explain how working-class women’s political activism grew out of their experiences in the workplace; and explores the tensions that sometimes arose between working-class women and the more privileged women who led the movement.
Lara Vapnek is a professor of history at St. John’s University. She specializes in the history of gender and labor in the 19th-and-20th-century United States, and is the author of “Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920” (2009) and “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary” (2015).
This upcoming event at the API is a part “Suffrage Speak,” a series of presentations and discussions by leading women’s history scholars designed to celebrate the upcoming centennial in 2020 of women winning the right to vote in the United States.
According to officials, this series will engage audiences and explore the issues in both past and present women’s movements.
Officials say speakers will draw parallels from the struggles of a century ago to current events in the U.S., and explore a balanced and realistic concept of what “equality” looks like, for women and for all Americans.
As America prepares to celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment, officials with the API say the institute is proud to invite audiences to join them for this important speakers series which is supported by a project grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission.
