THE PLEASURES OF AGE:
Old Women and Political Power in the Women’s Sufrage Movement
On her seventieth birthday in 1885, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered a speech on “The Pleasures of Age”. She declared that “fifty not fifteen is the heyday of woman’s life.”  While touring the country in the 1870s, Sojourner Truth turned her embodied performance of old age into a political claim for financial reparations owed formerly enslaved people.  By the 1890s, white suffragists hailed Susan B. Anthony as the “grand old woman of America” and compared her favorably to presidents Lincoln and Washington. In the nineteenth century, women suffragists demanded respect and security for older women as an essential dimension of political empowerment. Corrine Field, an Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia, will tell you why.  She’ll also tell you why these hopes remain largely unrealized over a century later.

Corinne Field  is currently completing a monograph entitled “Grand Old Women and Modern Girls: Age, Race, and Power in the US Women’s Rights Movement, 1870 to 1920” and co-editing with an interdisciplinary anthology on the global history of black girlhood with LaKisha Simmons. In 2018-2019, she was the Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

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(Sorry, no phone calls please.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all working remotely.)

2020 WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE COMMEMORATION PROGRAMMING
“Gaining the Vote: The Road to Women’s Suffrage” Virtual Series
August 2020 marks the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing American women the right to vote.  The Museums on the Green has been awarded a Discussion Grant from Mass Humanities/the National Endowment for the Humanities to support “Gaining the Vote: The Road to Women’s Suffrage,” a series of virtual talks and performances highlighting the long road to women’s suffrage. We’ll feature upcoming programs in our Calendar as they become available.

WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE RESOURCES
View our recommended reading and online resources lists related to American Women’s Suffrage.

UNTOLD TALES OF FALMOUTH: “Women Who Said ‘Why Not?'”

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