Towards Women's Suffrage: The Activism of Emily Howland

The women's suffrage movement was officially launched with the Seneca Falls (New York) Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. To commemorate the centennial of women's suffrage in the United States, Dr. Gerard Aching's talk will invite us to examine the geographical and historical circumstances in which the women's suffrage movement arose in this largely rural region of New York State. The lecture will focus on the life of Emily Howland, a leading figure in suffragism in the region, who, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton — lead author of the Declaration of Sentiments — began her activism in the US abolitionist movement.

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Gerard Aching is a full professor in the departments of Africana and Romance Literatures at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York). His lines of research include Caribbean colonial literatures, slavery, and Hispano-American philosophy and modernism. He is the author of three academic books: The Politics of Spanish American Modernism (Cambridge, 1997), Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (Minnesota, 2007) and Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba (Indiana, 2015). Her current research focuses on the relationships between the abolitionist movement and women's suffrage in New York State.