Humanities NY Grant celebrating the Suffrage Centennial (2017-2020) has been obtained by longtime Hostos English Professor Jerilyn Fisher with assistance from Lourdes Torres for the program, “VOTES FOR WOMEN!” 
 
This four-part lunchtime reading and discussion series proposed by Fisher offers College staff a unique “lunch and learn” experience this semester. Dean Peter Mertens of Continuing Education agreed to recruit participants from among CE staff. Fourteen people, including Dean Mertens himself, have joined this reading and discussion group.  
 
Fisher, who also coordinates Women’s and Gender Studies at Hostos, said the goal of the programming is to explore the dramatic story of heroic persistence, explicit race discrimination, and intensely political conflicts that made up the rocky path toward voting rights for women in 1920 (1917 in  New York). 
 
Participants meet monthly to discuss primary and secondary texts, and additional visual context is provided through short clips from the PBS documentary, One Woman, One Vote
 
Two special guests have been invited to speak during the series: 
 
April 18: Professor Jorge Matos will share the legacy of his extraordinary great, great grandmother, Ana Roqué de Duprey. Roqué started the feminist publication La Mujerand was theleading figure in Puerto Rico’s women’s suffrage movement, culminating in women’s right to vote finally granted in 1935. Notably, Roqué was also a woman of many other, extraordinary intellectual and civic accomplishments. 
 
May 16: For the culminating event, Hostos will welcome the Bronx’s own Coline Jenkins. She is the great, great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the renowned suffragist who wrote The Declaration of Sentiments and who co-organized the Seneca Falls Convention (1848). Both of these accomplishments were instrumental in lifting the woman suffrage movement into prominence during the 19thcentury. 
 
During Women’s History Month, Professor Fisher also arranged for Hostos students to be treated to a theatrical production on March 22 about the suffrage movement performed by The New Perspectives Theater Company and entitled On Her Shoulders: Suffragists From the Stage: Bloomers, Booze, Bicycles, and Ballots.
For more information, contact Professor Jerilyn Fisher at jfisher@hostos.cuny.edu