The Rogers State University Department of History and Political Science will be hosting a lecture on Nov. 5 commemorating the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in Oklahoma.
Dr. Rachel Gunter, a professor of history at Collin College in Plano, Texas, will present a lecture on Oklahoma woman suffrage at noon on Monday, Nov. 5, in the Baird Hall Performance Studio on the Claremore campus. She will also discuss how the strategies and success of the woman suffrage movement in Oklahoma affected other groups’ voting rights including Native Americans, African Americans, and WWI servicemen.
The date of her lecture coincides with the 100th anniversary of Oklahoma’s November 5, 1918 statewide election that ratified a universal woman suffrage amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution. Oklahoma became the 21st state to grant women the right to vote and went on to be the 33rd state to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
Dr. Gunter’s research focuses on woman suffrage in the South and in Texas where voting laws did not require voters to be citizens, but servicemen could not vote for the length of their enlistment during WWI. She analyzes the strategies used by suffragists when pursuing state and federal suffrage amendments including measures for partial suffrage, such as the right to vote on schoolboards or in primary elections only.
She earned her doctorate in history from Texas A&M University in 2017. She is a member of the Executive Advisory Committee for the “Handbook of Texas Women,” a project of the Texas State Historical Association. She is also the Texas Coordinator for the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, a crowd-sourced digital humanities project through the Women and Social Movements in the United States website. She published a chapter, “‘Without Us, It is Ferguson with a Plurality,’ Woman Suffrage and Anti-Ferguson Politics,” in “Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson, A Centennial Examination” for Texas A&M University Press.
RSU offers bachelor’s degrees in history, military history, public affairs, and social studies education, along with associate degrees in secondary education and social science. For more information, contact the RSU Department of History and Political Science at 918-343-6811.