Elisabeth Griffith Lecture: A Constitutional Quandary: Where Are the Women?

Marshall University’s Amicus Curiae Lecture Series on Constitutional Democracy will kick off the 2024-2025 academic year with a lecture by award-winning historian, author and educator Elisabeth Griffith titled “A Constitutional Quandary: Where Are the Women?”

The event, which is free and open to the public, is set for 7 p.m., Aug. 29 at the Brad D. Smith Foundation Hall.

A graduate of Wellesley College with a doctorate in history from American University, Griffith has worked with the National Women’s Political Caucus to expand women’s rights, elect women candidates and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. She has been teaching women’s history for 40 years.  Her 22-year tenure as head of The Madeira School, 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.

She is the author of “FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight For Equality, 1920-2020,” which has been lauded by The New York Times as an “engaging, relevant, sweeping chronicle” and “a multiracial, inclusive timeline of the struggles and triumphs of both Black and white women.  A profoundly illuminating tour de force.” 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,” and was the basis of Ken Burns’ documentary “Not For Ourselves Alone,” Burns’s only film on women’s history.

Her lecture will focus on the story of women’s rights in America and their fights for voting rights, civil rights, reproductive rights and equal protection of the law and how slow progress has, at times, been met by repeated setbacks and political and legal resistance.

“This lecture is incredibly timely, as we experience an era with women’s rights are at the center of our political conversation and a woman as nominee for president,” said Patricia Proctor, director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, which sponsors the lecture series. “Dr. Griffith will talk about Constitutional amendments, Supreme Court decisions and acts of Congress that have impacted women, as well as accompanying social movements and societal context.  She is an exciting and dynamic speaker, and I am very excited to welcome her to Marshall.”

The lecture series is sponsored by Marshall’s Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Drinko Academy in honor of Women’s Equality Day. For more information, contact Proctor by e-mail, at patricia.proctor@marshall.edu.