Focus on Faculty Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment with New Book By Professor Susan Poulson This article originally appeared in the spring 2019 issue of the Department of Latin American and Women’s Studies newsletter. Dr. Poulson’s book, titled Suffrage: The Epic Struggle for Women’s Right to Vote, was published by Praeger in August. Poulson is a professor of history.
The centennial celebration of the passage of the 19th Amendment is nearly upon us, and I am in the final stretch of writing a history of women’s suffrage. The fight for women’s suffrage was a long and colorful struggle, beginning with a small number of women and men who put forth the radical idea of treating women as political equals at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. After the Civil War, an informal alliance between abolitionists and women’s rights reformers broke over the 14th Amendment, which inserted the word “male” into the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Several Western states permitted women to vote — Wyoming was the first in 1869 — but national suffrage did not come until women formed a mass movement, with growing militancy, that put increasing pressure on a reluctant political establishment. After Tennessee became the final state to ratify in a dramatic vote at the state’s capital, 20 million American women were able to go to the polls in the fall of 1920. This book has been several years in the making, with visits to more than a dozen archives across the nation to highlight several of the intriguing citizens who favored and opposed the suffrage movement. The struggle mirrors the changing views and norms for American women from the midnineteenth to the early twentiethcentury and provides background for the continuing evolution in gender roles today.
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THE SCRANTON JOURN A L
Oscar Romero is a ‘Light for our Time’ Will Cohen, Ph.D., associate professor of theology/religious studies, recently presented his research on St. Oscar Romero at the Faculty Research Seminar Series. His talk was titled “Political Wokeness and Christian Witness in the Life and Legacy of St. Oscar Romero.” Cohen published an article in Theological Studies a couple years ago and plans to write an article on his new research. The Scranton Journal asked him a few questions about his work. You can find an extended version online.
What does being politically woke have to do with St. Oscar Romero? THE SCRANTON JOURNAL:
Because Romero as archbishop of San Salvador in the late 1970s spoke out strongly against economic injustice and repressive government policies, and because, prior to becoming archbishop, he had not been so outspoken, biographers have often suggested Romero underwent a “conversion” — from a more personal, devotional understanding of Christianity to a more social understanding. WILL COHEN:
The conversion narrative in Romero’s case has seemed to me to resonate with the idea of becoming “woke” in the sense we often hear it used today. In fact, the motif of waking up is itself actually pervasive throughout the Christian spiritual tradition. For example, in the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, sung liturgically every Lent in my own Eastern Orthodox tradition, a recurring refrain is “O my soul, why are you sleeping?” The emphasis is on an interior awakening to one’s own propensity to sin and the reality of God’s judgment. With Romero, becoming more woke also entailed exposing cultural lies, e.g. the lie spread by the Salvadoran government that the only enemy of Christianity was Marxist ideology. He believed that the oligarchs themselves, though purporting to be the guardians of Catholic culture and tradition, were actually warping the Christian message by their unwillingness to give up worldly advantages to bring about a more just society. TSJ: Why is this all so relevant now? WC: We live in a time characterized by distrust — especially of the narratives peddled by our political opponents. It is good to be suspicious of party lines, but we tend not to distrust our own party’s lines, only the other’s. Romero’s commitment to the Gospel above all else enabled him to be “woke” to whatever was not in alignment with it; this commitment gave him a remarkable freedom to engage political issues with wisdom and clarity and not allow the faith to be co-opted by politics. In this sense, he is a light for our time.
