March is women’s history month—and in commemoration of the celebration, this week we hosted a conversation exploring the story of the pursuit of women’s rights in early America. Sara Chatfield, assistant professor of political science at the University of Denver and author of Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage, and Nicole Evelina, bestselling novelist, biographer, and poet, and author of America’s Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor, join to explore the different aspects and dimensions of the fight for women’s rights in the 19th and 20th centuries—from economic and property rights, to women’s suffrage and the right to vote. They dig into the origins and consequences of laws guaranteeing married women’s property rights and how and why these laws changed over time, as well as the story of married couple Virginia and Francis Minor, which exemplified a partnership devoted to securing broader rights for women—from property rights to suffrage, through a case brought by the Minors that took the issue of voting rights for women to the Supreme Court for the first and only time in 1875. Host Jeffrey Rosen moderates. 

Resources  

• Sara Chatfield, In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage (2023)
• Nicole Evelina, America’s Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor (2023)
• Minor v. Happersett (1875)
• Emily Zackin, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights (2013)
• Chloe Thurston, At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State (2018)

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