As part of our “Women on Wednesdays” series, please join the Women & Politics Institute kick-off our Women’s Suffrage Centennial Series. Our first event will be held on August 26th, Women's Equality Day, which commemorates the 1920 certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.

Co-editors Dr. Stacie Taranto and Dr. Leandra Zarnow will discuss their new book, Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics Since 1920, “the first wide-ranging collection to historically examine women's full political engagement in and beyond electoral office since they gained a constitutional right to vote,” with WPI Executive Director Betsy Fischer Martin.

Despite the record-setting “Year of the Women” in 2018, where 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate, and nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020 remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two scholars to examine how the struggle for voting power and political power continues, exploring “why women's access to, and influence on, political power remains frustratingly uneven, particularly for women of color and queer women.”

Dr. Stacie Taranto is an associate professor of history at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where her teaching and research focus on post-1945 U.S. political and women's history. She is the author of Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York. She holds an A.B. in history from Duke University and an A.M.and Ph. D. in history from Brown University.

Dr. Leandra Zarnow is an assistant professor of history and affiliated faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. She is the author of Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug. She holds a B.A. in Government and American Studies from Smith College, and a Ph.D. in history, with an emphasis in feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Betsy Fischer Martin is an Emmy-winning journalist and former TV news executive. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University and a faculty member in the School of Public Affairs, where she teaches courses on campaigns and elections. During her earlier career in television news, she spent 23 years at NBC News serving as the longtime Executive Producer of Meet the Press with Tim Russert and as the Managing Editor of NBC News Political Programming.

A native of New Orleans, Fischer Martin did her undergraduate and graduate work at American University in Washington, DC. She is a cum laude graduate of their School of Public Affairs and earned a master’s degree in Broadcast Journalism from the AU School of Communication.

"Women on Wednesdays": Women's Suffrage Centennial with Dr. Stacie Taranto and Dr. Leandra Zarnow