Let’s Talk About It: Women’s Suffrage Programming will begin in March
Drake University’s Cowles Library is one of 25 libraries nationwide selected to participate in the American Library Association’s Let’s Talk About It (LTAI): Women’s Suffrage, a grant designed to spark conversations about American history and culture through an examination of the women’s suffrage movement.
During the Spring Semester, five conversations will be held, each focusing on one grant-nominated book. Each discussion will be led by one Drake faculty member and one Drake student. The programming is sponsored by Cowles Library, Department of History, and Women’s and Gender Studies Program and further builds on the discussions around the traveling exhibit, Toward a Universal Suffrage: African American Women in Iowa and the Vote For All, on display in the Cowles Library Reading Room from February 21-March 7.
As part of the grant, Cowles Library will receive the following books:
- The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss
- Women Making History: The 19th Amendment Book, essays compiled by the National Park Service
- Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones
- Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells by Michelle Duster
- The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
The first discussion in the Drake series will be on Elaine Weiss’s The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. It will be co-facilitated by Dr. Rachel Paine Caufield and Emma Brustkern on Wednesday, March 2 at 5:30pm in the Cowles Library Reading Room.
Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2022, Let’s Talk About It is a reading and discussion program that involves groups of people reading a series of books selected by national project scholars and discussing them in the context of an overarching theme. The format for a Let’s Talk About It program involves a ten-week series. Every two weeks, a discussion group meets with a local humanities scholar to discuss one of the five books in the theme.
LTAI: Women’s Suffrage is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). To explore resources from past LTAI themes, visit the project website.
For more information on the series please visit https://researchguides.drake.edu/suffrage or contact any member of the LTAI: Women’s Suffrage Planning Committee: Jill Allen, Hope Bibens, Carrie Dunham-LaGree, and Karen Leroux.