Doris Weatherford: The 19th Amendment, 100 years later

Sam Gill is senior vice president and chief program officer at John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In this role, he oversees all of Knight’s grantmaking programs — Community and National Initiatives, Journalism, and Arts. He also oversees Learning and Impact, Knight’s research and assessment program. Sam is the host of the podcast The Future of Democracy, a weekly conversation about the trends ideas and disruptions changing the face of democracy.

Doris Weatherford is extensively recognized for her contributions to the field of women’s history. She was editor-in-chief and major contributor to the monumental reference work, A History of Women in the United States: State-by-State Reference, which offers detailed and engaging histories of women in each of the fifty states. Her other publications include Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1920; American Women’s History: An A―Z of People, Organizations, Issues and Events;  and a two-volume work for Congressional Quarterly Press, Women in American Politics: History and Milestones. Weatherford’s Victory for the Vote: The Fight for Women’s Suffrage and the Century that Followed (Mango) offers an engaging and detailed narrative history of women’s seven-decade fight for the vote, and the continuing current-day struggle for human rights and equality. It puts the fight for suffrage into contemporary context by discussing key challenges for women in the decades that followed 1920, such as reproductive rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and political power. In her foreword, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi notes that Victory for the Vote ” not only tells the story of the trailblazing suffragists of Seneca Falls; it also shares the story of women of color whose heroism in the fight for women’s suffrage is too often unsung, but who are finally taking their rightful place in American history. “