338 Main St
Southwest Harbor, ME
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
On Thursday, September 12th at 5:30 p.m. the library will host “What Suffragists Can Teach Us about the 2024 Elections” with Kimberly A. Hamlin, an award-winning historian, author, and professor specializing in the history of women, gender, and sex in the United States. The talk is sponsored by The League of Women Voters-Downeast. Online viewing is available. Registration encouraged.
In 2024, we face one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s history. Voting rights, democratic norms, and women’s bodily autonomy are at risk like never before; at the same time, our nation may well elect a woman President for the first time. The intersections between gender, sex, race, and democracy have not been this pronounced since the 1910s when women secured the right to vote. What can the suffragists teach us about the election of 2024? About the links between bodily autonomy and political autonomy? And about the role of race and racism in the women’s movement? Join League of Women Voters - US (LWVUS) Board Member Kimberly Hamlin for an engaged discussion of the historical context of 2024.
Hamlin’s work includes the Suffrage movement and activism for women’s rights, and draws a compelling through-line to the current moment. Hamlin’s most recent book Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (W.W. Norton 2020, paperback 2022) tells the fascinating story of the “fallen woman” who reinvented herself and became “the most potent factor” in Congressional passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the highest-ranking woman in the federal government.