AAUW Women's Suffrage Centennial Lecture Series Kicks Off:
"Voting Around the World in 80 Years"
Guest Speaker: Cassandra Peltier, Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum

Cassandra Peltier, Executive Director of the Susan B Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, MA, will be the opening speaker in a series of public programs about Women's Suffrage sponsored by the Bennington Branch of the American Association of University Women. The meeting will be held on Tuesday, October 15, 7 p.m. in the Rotary Room of the Bennington Free Library.

Ms. Peltier's talk is titled "Voting: Around the World in 80 Years." As described in a Susan B. Anthony Museum publication, "Women's rights to vote were granted and rescinded in other countries, states and provinces in the centuries leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The beginning of the U.S. Women's Suffrage Movement was marked most officially by the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, yet women's right to vote was not nationally codified for another eight decades."

Ms. Peltier will discuss the social history of the Suffrage Movement, how women were perceived at the time, and the obstacles and accusations they faced in their quest for universal enfranchisement.

She will speak about the long-standing social and political climates which kept women from the polls, as well as several of the historical events and remarkable women that helped the Women's Suffrage Movement reach its goals.

The series on Women's Suffrage continues on Saturday, November 2, from 1 to 4 p.m. with a public Bennington Branch meeting of AAUW, co-presented by the Bennington Free Library. In the afternoon's "Suffrage Transcribe-a-thon," branch members and community volunteers are invited to come to the library to transcribe, review and tag historical documents in the Suffrage Papers collection held by the Library of Congress.