George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

The post-Civil War world witnessed an explosion of rights demands by a wide range of women—more than at any point in U.S. history.  Yet we have little history of this. Instead, the conventional story focuses on women’s suffrage as the main event, eclipsing the many other rights campaigns women launched. This workshop aims to foreground those other rights demands and spur new thinking about how we might narrate this complex expansion in women’s claims upon dignity and equality.

On Friday, September 20 and Saturday September 21, 2019, the Richards Center, along with the Department of African American Studies, the Africana Research Center, the Department of History, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Penn State University Libraries, hosted Women’s Rights and the Post-Civil War World. Tera Hunter delivered the keynote lecture, “‘Confronted by Both a Woman Question and a Race Problem’: African American Women, Slavery, and Post-Civil War Rights” on Friday evening the Foster Auditorium. Scholars, including Lori Ginzberg, Kimberley Reilly, Charlene J. Fletcher, Tiffany Hale, Cathleen Cahill, Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Felicity Turner, and Lisa Tetrault, gathered on Saturday to share and discuss papers with workshop participants.