About the lecture
The recent centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment offers an opportunity to discuss the evolution of women’s rights, civil rights and voting rights. The foundation for this talk is a new book, Front Lines, Front Pages: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage, a collection of research by 13 women scholars, which examines the racial, geographic, periodical and political diversity of the suffrage movement, as well as the active role of media in shaping public understandings of that movement’s purpose and fate. In an overview of these new studies, Dr. Kitch will focus on some lesser-known activists, publications and ideas that fueled the suffrage movement more than a century ago. She also will discuss how public memory has transformed the suffrage story over time, in predictable ways but also, amid recent events, in some unexpected ways. In its own time and in its legacies, mediation of the suffrage movement constructed public debates about citizenship – about enfranchisement, representation and political agency – that remain vividly in motion today.
About the speaker
Dr. Carolyn Kitch is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Journalism and a member of the faculty of the Media and Communication Doctoral Program of the Klein College of Media and Communication. She also has been a faculty fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Temple. She has authored, co-authored or co-edited five books, as well more than 70 articles and chapters about journalism history, public memory, magazines and gender issues in media, and she serves on the editorial boards of 11 scholarly journals. She is a former magazine editor and writer for McCall’s, Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest.