Historian Asks, "What If America Had Been Run By Women?"

ADAMS, MA - The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum will host a talk and birthday celebration on Sunday, February 13 in Adams, Massachusetts to honor one of the world's greatest human rights leaders, Susan B. Anthony. The event will be held at 3:00 pm in the Adams Free Library.

Prize-winning author and historian Dr. Jennifer J. Popiel will present, "Brazen Hussies or Civic Housekeepers: Who Were the Real Suffragists?” The 40-minute talk will be followed by a birthday cake for the legendary Susan B. Anthony. The event is co-hosted by the Adams Historical Society and funded in part by the South Adams Savings Bank.

Women won the vote 90 years ago, but the trail they blazed was hard fought on every front. Based on feminist Jane Addams' 1913 hypothetical query, what if men, instead of women, were seeking the vote, Dr. Popiel explores how the arguments would fare if the tables were turned: What would happen if America had been run by women and, in response to the demand by men to vote, what would women say? Popiel describes how suffrage adversaries affected public dialogue and how women leaders responded to accusations of bad mothers, brazen hussies, and domineering wives in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Professor Popiel has many academic interests, including women, domesticity, and public activism. Popiel graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Trinity University and received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught history and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay and Saint Louis University, where she is an International Studies Teaching Fellow. Her book, Rousseau's Daughters, won the 2009 David Pinkney Prize for best book in French history, and in 2010 she won the Mellon Research Award. She will be a presenter at the Fifteenth Annual Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Amherst College this June. Popiel serves on the Board of Historical Advisors for the new Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Massachusetts, which opened in 2010.

Born in Adams on February 15, 1820, Susan Brownell Anthony advocated for temperance and abolition and devoted her life to the fight for the rights of women. Anthony's family had a long tradition as Quakers, and Susan was raised to value human equality. Early on she became an associate of Fredrick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, leaders in the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War. By 1892 she became the National Woman's Suffrage Association's president. Susan B. Anthony died in 1906, thirteen years before the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote was finally passed.