Political Wives and the Political Legacy of Elizabeth Edwards
In the wake of the tragic passing of Elizabeth Edwards, two essays consider lessons from her public life.
Maps of Major Cities by Race and Ethnicity
Speaking in Tongues: One President, Double Voices
Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular. We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls ... [Yet] between two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.Essay by Zadie Smith
Keep In Mind Your Mission
Ginsburg’s advice for public speaking and other life endeavors
Speeches of Praise and Obama’s Science Party
Recent research by PeerReviewed featured on The Silver Tongue
Campaign Gear
As part of the winning campaign for equal suffrage in Washington state, a suffragist climbed Mt Rainier with a “Votes for Women” banner, wearing these.
100 Years and More
100 Years Ago Today: Women of Washington state won the right to vote, a decade before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
Game Changers and History Makers
I’m looking forward to presenting my work on rhetoric, the law and social change at the 2010 Pacific Northwest History Conference tomorrow. Here’s a synopsis of the project I’ll discuss:
Women counted a stunning legal defeat among their early experiences as advocates for equal suffrage in the Pacific Northwest. Although Washington women achieved suffrage in 1883, the law that secured their right to vote faced a series of legal challenges. In 1887 and 1888, the Washington Territory Supreme Court ruled that legislation enfranchising women was unconstitutional. In addition to excluding women from polling places and jury boxes, the court’s legal decisions left few clear political options for the nascent equal suffrage movement in the Pacific Northwest.
Nonetheless, women of the region did not eschew legal advocacy in the wake of monumental legal defeat. Instead, they adapted their rhetoric and innovated arguments for women’s legal rights. This essay examines arguments about the law that women of the Pacific Northwest advanced between 1870 and 1910. It illuminates how legal advocacy by disenfranchised women in the Northwest cultivated their political networks and skills, involved increasing numbers of women in public activism, produced significant arguments for equal rights, and altered jurisprudence.
Five Myths About the 2010 Election
Even if 2010 won't be remembered as the year of the woman, it was a year in which the conversation about women and how they participate in the political process has been fierce, vibrant and angry ...Rebecca Traister
Why Weak Ties Matter
Lehrer in Response to Gladwell: “The Revolution certainly won’t be televised. But it just might be helped along by Twitter.”