Constitution & Citizenship Day 2020 “The Unfinished Work of Suffrage”: a virtual conference

More info:

https://history.sfsu.edu/constitution-day-2020

Keynote: “Disabling Democracy” by Rabia Belt (Stanford Law School)
Roundtable participants: Susan Burch (Middlebury), Marc Stein (SFSU-History)
Topic: Professor Belt speaks from her current project “Disabling Democracy in America: Disability, Citizenship, Suffrage, and the Law, 1819-1920.”  She addresses the intersection of disability and race in the campaigns for women’s suffrage in an approximately 45-minute lecture followed by a 45-minute conversation among the participants.

Keynote: “Surprising Facts about Suffrage” by Ellen DuBois (UCLA)
Roundtable panelists: Sue Englander (SFSU-History), Sherry Katz (SFSU-History), Judy Wu (UC-Irvine)
Topic: Professor DuBois, author of Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote (2020), offers an approximately 45-minute lecture followed by a 45-minute conversation with participants about the campaign for suffrage and the 19th Amendment centennial. Panelists address issues of identity and representation, specifically addressing questions about race and racism in how we choose to commemorate the movement.

Interview: Katherine Marino (UCLA)
Participants: Michael Aguirre (Harvard’s Inequality in America Initiative and University Nevada-Reno)
Topic: Professor Marino answers questions about her book Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019). The app. 45-minute discussion specifically addresses the pioneering leadership of Latin American feminists in the transnational suffrage movement during the interwar period. Topics include calls by these women to include anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks along with woman’s rights in human rights campaigns.

Interview: Mona Siegel (Sacramento State)
Participants: Sarah Curtis (SFSU-History)
Topic: Professor Siegel discusses her book: Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights (2020). Their 45-minute discussion addresses the activism of women in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America immediately following WWI. Their vision was one based not only on the sovereignty of independent states but also the fundamental humanity and equality of all people. Also discussed are the connections to the independence and nationalist movements in Egypt and China.

Interview: Melissa R. Klapper (Rowan University)
Participants: Rachel Gross (SFSU-Jewish Studies)
Topic: Professor Klapper discusses her book Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890- 1940 (2013). She talks with Dr. Gross for app. 45 minutes about Jewish American political activism, particularly suffrage, birth control, and peacework in the years before WWII. She also discusses the role of antisemitism in these movements and the need to include religion in conversations and commemorations of suffrage.

Interview: Tracey Deutsch (University of Minnesota)
Participants: Kelsey Sims (SFSU-History)
Topic: Professor Deutsch discusses her book Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (2010) and her recent co-authored microsyllabus “Wages for Housework and Social Reproduction.” Questions by Sims highlight the demands by female consumers to recognize and regulate the labor of consumerism in this 45-minute zoom interview. Topics addressed include the gendering of poverty, unions, early consumer rights organizations, unpaid labor, mutual aid societies, and the future of grocery stores.

Interview: Gill Frank (University of Virginia) + Kacey Calahane (UC-Irvine)
Topic: In a 60-minute conversation, Gill Frank, co-editor of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States (2018) and Kacey Calahane, finishing a dissertation entitled The General and Her Soldiers: How Phyllis Schlafly and Eagle Forum Mobilized the Conservative Movement, discuss the women’s liberation movement and the gay liberation movement, the opposition by conservative evangelicals and their connection to pro-segregation forces and Hulu’s Mrs. America.

Roundtable: gender, race + labor during the pandemic
Participants: Valerie Francisco (SFSU-Sociology), Karen Hossfeld (SFSU-Sociology), Julietta Hua (SFSU-Women & Gender Studies)
Topic: Panelists talk for app. 45 minutes about the disproportionate toll of the pandemic on women, specifically women of color and undocumented women. Issues discussed include the so-called “she-cession,” women as unprotected frontline workers, gig workers, and domestic workers, and the long-term toll on the careers of women caretaking for family members.

Roundtable: Kamala Harris, VP pick
Participants: Mario Burrus (SFSU-History), Rebecca Eissler (SFSU-Political Science), Amanda Roberti (SFSU-Political Science), Anantha Sudhakar (SFSU-Asian American Studies)
Topic: Participants discuss Kamala Harris’s historic VP candidacy, the racist, misogynist, and xenophobic backlash she has faced, and the context of the long Black freedom movement, including