A guest post by Professor Jean Pedersen, Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music
On Thursday, 7 October, 2021, the History Department celebrated the recent 2020 centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States by assembling to hear world-renowned women’s historian Karen Offen deliver the Verne Moore Lecture on the topic “Seeking Woman Suffrage: A Transnational Journey from Colonial America, via France and England, to Egypt and Kuwait.” This was the department’s first in-person public talk since the start of the pandemic over a year and a half ago, and it was a real pleasure to be together in the Hawkins-Carlson Room again.
Dr. Offen is a Senior Scholar at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and one of the co-founders of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. She served on the Bureau of the International Committee for the Historical Sciences in Paris and the Board of Directors of the International Museum of Women in San Francisco, and she has been investigating women’s history and the comparative history of feminisms for over forty years. Her many publications include European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford, 2000); Globalizing Feminisms, 1789-1950 (Routledge, 2010); The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870 (Cambridge, 2017); Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, 2018); and, most recently, Women’s History at the Cutting Edge (co-edited with Chen Yan, Routledge, 2019).
Dr. Offen spent four days in residency at the University of Rochester so that she could deliver her Verne Moore Lecture on women’s international struggle for the right to vote, work in the extensive Susan B. Anthony archives that we have in the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, and meet with our faculty and graduate students in the History Department. Her talk, which focused on the interconnected histories of the American, French, and British suffrage movements, highlighted some of the many times and places in which activists from these three countries took inspiration from each other's work on both sides of the Atlantic. She showed how the historic women’s rights meeting that Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized at Seneca Falls, New York, took place just after the Revolutions of 1848 that prompted Jeanne Deroin to run for political office in France, how American suffrage activist Alice Paul based the strategies and tactics of her National Woman’s Party on the example of British suffrage activists Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and their Women’s Social and Political Union, and how women across the United States and Europe finally gained the right to vote after the international upheavals of the First and Second World Wars.
Dr. Offen’s newest project focuses on May Wright Sewall and the creation of the International Council of Women, a transnational organization that had its first meeting in Washington, DC, in 1888 and continues to advise the United Nations to this day. We look forward to reading and hearing more about the history of women and their many different national and international organizations as Dr. Offen continues her invaluable work in this area.