Throughout our country’s history, in every community, women have worked to safeguard their families, protect and educate their children and improve infrastructure (beginning with sidewalks and sewers). At the same time, women lacked all legal rights – to their bodies, their children, their wages and property, if any. Many were confined to a “separate sphere.” How did women contribute to a revolution, improve factory conditions, amend the Constitution and advance civil rights? Please join a conversation about how women gained power and became agents of change.
In collaboration with Womentum, with funding provided by Teton County Library Foundation and Friends.
Historian Elisabeth Griffith is an author, activist, and expert on American women’s history. Her biography of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, IN HER OWN RIGHT, was hailed by both Oprah and the Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best books on women’s history.” It was the basis of Ken Burns’ documentary on Stanton and Anthony, NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE, his only film about women’s history.
Betsy’s new book, FORMIDABLE: AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY, 1920-2020, is an “engaging, relevant, sweeping chronicle,” according to the New York Times, “a multiracial, inclusive timeline of the struggles and triumphs of both Black and white women. A profoundly illuminating tour de force.”
A graduate of Wellesley College with a doctorate in history from American University, Betsy worked with the National Women’s Political Caucus to expand women’s rights, elect women candidates and ratify the ERA. She has been teaching women’s history for forty years. Her twenty-two-year tenure as head of Madeira, a girls’ boarding and day school in McLean, Virginia, earned the Washington Post’s Distinguished Educational Leadership Award. A member of the Society of American Historians and Veteran Feminists of America, she has been a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard and a Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia.
Recently Betsy began publishing essays about women past and present on Substack. Her PINK THREADS relate to specific historic dates in women’s history. Recent posts addressed Title IX, Barbies, Margaret Chase Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience,” the Brown v. Board decision, and the musical SUFFS.
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