The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Presents:
GENDER OUT OF BOUNDS
Susan Goodier
Lecturer, History Department
SUNY Oneonta
Thursday, February 25, 2016
4:30 - 5:30 PM
Milne Library 318
“A Fundamental Component: Suffrage for African American Women”
Dr. Susan Goodier, History and Women’s Studies, will speak about her new work on African-American women in the New York suffrage movement. The right to vote held particular meaning for black
women, who adamantly supported the right for black men. Many black men, however, did not necessarily support women’s right to vote. Because racism and classism worked against black women’s
involvement in white woman suffrage organizations, much of their suffrage-related activism took
place as a fundamental component of their work in numerous local and national clubs. Nevertheless, most studies that address black women’s suffrage work do so through the lens of white women’s activism. This project highlights the vitality and meaning of black women’s suffrage activism
across the state on its own merit.
Dr. Susan Goodier is influenced by her passion for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s history while focusing
on U.S. women’s activism from the period of the Civil War through the First World War. She did her graduate work at SUNY at
Albany, earning a master’s degree in Gender History in 1999 and a doctorate in Public Policy History, with subfields in International Gender and Culture and Black Women’s History, in 2007. She then completed a second master’s degree in Women’s
Studies in 2008. Before coming to Oneonta, she taught classes in U.S., World, Women’s History, and Research and Analytical
Writing at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica. Her book, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement
was published in 2013 (Univ. Illinois Press). She is a public scholar for the New York Council for the Humanities and is the coordinator for the Upstate New York Women’s History Organization (UNYWHO). Her forthcoming website project, “How Did
Women Anti-Suffragists in New York Try to Reconcile the Contradictions between Their Strategies and Arguments?,” is part of
the Women and Social Movements Document Project (Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds.; Alexander Street Press).
Dr. Goodier’s current book project is on the New York State Woman Suffrage Movement, with publication expected in 2017,
just in time to celebrate the centennial of women voting in New York State.
For more information about Gender Out of Bounds presentations contact Susan Bernardin at
[email protected] or the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at 436-2014.