Monroe County Historical Association

Following the luncheon and a brief business meeting, Wilkes University professor Amy Sopcak-Joseph presented a program on the creation of the 19th Amendment and the suffrage movement.

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the “Declaration of Sentiments” and presented it to a relatively small assemblage of like-minded people at a meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, Stanton’s document not only called for women’s suffrage rights but also outlined the limitations to women’s opportunities and what she saw as the circumscribed role allowed for them in society.

Over the next seven decades, women and men debated not only whether women should be able to go to the polls but also why. Were women to be equal participants in politics, the public sphere, and their families? Or was their participation in the American republic best defined by different standards from men?

To mark the 105th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, this program will consider the historical perspectives that shaped the path to women’s suffrage rights in the 19th century and modern echoes of those debates in the 21st century.

Dr. Amy Sopcak-Joseph, an assistant professor of history at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, teaches courses on the histories of early America and women and gender, as well as public history. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Sopcak-Joseph also serves as director of the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.