Town Hall

The Agitators and The Women’s Fight

March 30, 2021

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Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor at The New Yorker and author of the new book The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights, and Thavolia Glymph, Duke University historian and author of the book The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, discuss the early days of the abolition movement and the fight for women’s rights, the complicated relationship between the two movements, and heroes like Harriet Tubman who emerged through both. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the McNulty Foundation in partnership with the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women's Leadership at Villanova University, and is presented as part of the Center’s Women and the Constitution initiative.

 


Participants

Dorothy Wickenden is the executive editor of The New Yorker and moderates the magazine’s weekly podcast, The Political Scene. She is the author of two books: Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West, and most recently, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden has also served the managing editor and eventually the executive editor of The New Republic and as the national-affairs editor at Newsweek.

Thavolia Glymph is a historian and professor of history and law at Duke University. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, which received the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize, and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, a finalist for the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. 

Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
 

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