WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — "The Strange Career of the 14th Amendment" is speaker Sara Dubow's topic for the Williamstown League of Women Voters annual Susan B. Anthony Dinner on March 18. 

 

Sara Dubow is a professor of history at Williams College, where she teaches courses in women's and gender history, recent U.S. history, and legal history. Her first book, "Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America" (Oxford University Press, 2010) won the 2011 Bancroft Prize.

 

Dubow will be providing background to the amendment's ratification after the Civil War and its current position of controversy in the wake of President Trump's Executive Order that claims to eliminate birthright citizenship guaranteed by the amendment, stated the press release. 

 

Her talk will examine selected cases from three key periods in 14th Amendment jurisprudence — the 1880s and 1890s; the 1950s and 1960s, and the 2020s — as a vantage point for understanding the Supreme Court's role in expanding and contracting the possibilities of the amendment as imagined at its ratification.

 

The 14th Amendment is especially relevant to the League and to Susan B. Anthony because the women's suffrage movement endured a split over its ratification. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed it because, although it guaranteed citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, it specified they had to be "male" in order to vote. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe worked for its passage and formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, while Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. That rift healed eventually, but it was many years between the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the 19th Amendment finally granting women the vote in 1920.

 

The League's Susan B. Anthony Dinner will be at the Williams Faculty Club, 968 Main St. in Williamtown at 5:30 p.m. on March 18. Tickets for the buffet dinner cost $55 and must be reserved in advance at zrobi@hotmail.com. Deadline for reservations is March 11.