Welcome Remarks for Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement
McGowan Theater, National Archives Building, Washington, DC
March 26, 2019
Good afternoon, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives. I’m David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and I’m pleased you could join us for today’s program, whether you are here in the theater or joining us through Facebook or YouTube.
Before we hear from Katherine Marino about her new book, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement, I’d like to tell you about two other programs coming up in the next couple of days.
Tomorrow evening at 7 p.m., we’ll have special preview screening of a new documentary called Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People. The film is part of PBS’s American Masters series and following the screening, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky and novelist Nicholson Baker will discuss the film.
On Thursday, March 28, at 7 p.m., Tom Wheeler will tell us about his new book, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future, which brings to life the two great network revolutions of the past and uses them to help put in perspective the confusion, uncertainty, and even excitement most people face today.
Check our website, Archives.gov, or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You’ll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities.
Another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports the work of the agency, especially its education and outreach programs. Visit its website—archivesfoundation.org—to learn more about the Foundation and join online.
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Next month, on May 10, we will open a new exhibit upstairs in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote uses National Archives records to tell the story of women’s struggle for voting rights as a critical step toward equal citizenship.
The 19th Amendment is rightly celebrated as a major milestone, yet it is just one critical piece of the larger story of women’s battle for the vote. Rightfully Hers and a companion traveling exhibit, One Half of the People, will explore how American women across the spectra of race, ethnicity, and class advanced the cause of suffrage and will follow the struggle for voting rights beyond 1920.
While this centennial focuses our attention on women in the United States, it also gives us the opportunity to discover the women’s rights movements in other nations. Katherine Marino’s new book Feminism for the Americas reminds that that the struggle for women’s rights was a global movement.
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Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies. Her research and teaching interests include 20th-century U.S. and Latin American history; histories of women, gender, sexuality, and race in the Americas; human rights; and transnational feminism. Her book Feminism for the Americas is based on her dissertation, which won the 2014 Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation on U.S. Women’s History. Her writing has also appeared in the Journal of Women's History, Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, Gender & History, the San Francisco Chronicle and La Prensa of Panama City, among other publications. She has appeared on the podcasts Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective and Human Rights in Transit. Her work has received support from national organizations, including the Mellon Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Katherine Marino.