The Challenges of the First Fifty Years of Women’s Suffrage

Dr. Rebecca Tuuri’s presentation examines the first fifty years of the women’s suffrage in Mississippi, with a focus on the work of the Mississippi League of Women Voters (LWV) from the months before the ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment through the late 1960s when the state’s League was transformed into the progressive and interracial group that it is today. Nationally, the LWV was the organization that suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt founded in 1920 to replace the National American Woman Suffrage Association and to help educate the newly enfranchised woman voters in America. Therefore, the LWV in Mississippi was arguably the most important women’s voting organization in the state. This talk illuminates the successes and challenges of Mississippi women’s early efforts to empower voting women around the state.

Speakers Expertise:

Dr. Rebecca Tuuri is an assistant professor of African American and American history at the University of Southern Mississippi. She received a Ph.D. in United States History from Rutgers University in 2012, with a concentration in Women's and Gender and African American history. Her current manuscript, Careful Crusader: The History of the National Council of Negro Women in Black Freedom Struggle investigates the history of the civil war rights work of the largest black women's organization in the 1960s and 1970s.