11/16 - "Building Female Citizenship Beyond Suffrage: Early Women Candidates and Office Holding in Oregon" with Kimberly Jensen, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Western Oregon University, noon - 1 pm

Professor Jensen will discuss the work of women across the political spectrum as local and statewide candidates and office holders in the decades before and after the achievement of women's suffrage in 1912. She will assess the challenges they faced and their accomplishments and legacy and connect their work with the broad movement for equal citizenship in Oregon.

Location: Montag Den, Willamette University*
Price: Free! Brown-bag lunch; food available for purchase from Goudy Commons and Cat Cavern (near the Montag Den)

* The Montag Den is located on the ground floor of Baxter Hall, near the corner of State and 12th Streets.

Presentation Abstract and Speaker Biography:

As Oregon women pursued a more complete female citizenship through voting rights from 1870-1912 and beyond they also worked to achieve another aspect of full citizenship through office holding. This presentation will address the work of women across the political spectrum as local and statewide candidates and office holders in the decades before and after the achievement of women's suffrage in 1912. It will assess the challenges they faced and their accomplishments and legacy and connect their work with the broad movement for equal citizenship in Oregon.

Kimberly Jensen is a Professor of History and Gender Studies at Western Oregon University. She received her Ph.D. in Women's and U.S. History from the University of Iowa in 1992. Her book Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2008 and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards for non-fiction. Her current research project is a biography of Oregon physician, suffragist, and international medical relief director Esther Pohl Lovejoy. She received the Joel Palmer Prize from the Oregon Historical Quarterly for her Fall 2007 article “’Neither Head Nor Tail to the Campaign’: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912” and her article “Revolutions in the Machinery: Oregon Women and Citizenship in Sesquicentennial Perspective,” was published in the Fall 2009 issue of the Quarterly. She is also the editor, with Erika Kuhlman, of Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters Press, 2010). Jensen is a member of the editorial boards of the Oregon Historical Quarterly and the Oregon Encyclopedia Project, serves as a commissioner on the Oregon Heritage Commission, and is a member of the board of Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012.