Williamstown League of Women Voters Annual Susan B. Anthony Dinner

11:22AM / Thursday, March 05, 2026Print Story | Email Story

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.

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Williamstown Studying Major Overhaul for Main Street

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:14AM / Wednesday, July 29, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The town is working with a Worcester civil engineering firm to redesign Main Street with an eye toward a major project sometime in the next decade.

Community Development Director Andrew Groff was before the Select Board on Monday night to talk about Town Hall's use of a $500,000 state grant to do preliminary design on major improvements to that portion of Route 2 that runs from Water Street west to the Field Park rotary, through the middle of Williams College's campus.

Groff introduced the elected officials to Amanda Bazinet of Worcester's Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, who is helping the town to develop a plan for Main Street that would align with the commonwealth's Complete Streets Program.

"Our project goals, in addition to the increased pedestrian and bicycle accommodations, is just, in general, improving the sightlines and improving the intersection geometry," Bazinet said.

"Complete Streets … has a lot of different facets to it. As Andrew had mentioned, the goal is to improve the safety for all of the roadway users — not just the motorists. We're looking at improving it for pedestrians, bicyclists, anyone using a mobility device. We want to create streets that are safe for all ages and abilities to use. So, while bicyclists will still be allowed, legally, to use the roadway, we want to look at providing a separate bicycle accommodation along the corridor, whether it's a shared use path along both sides of the streets that is a little more accessible to young children or older people with disabilities to look at all transportation options."

One goal is to encourage "active transportation." The Massachusetts Department of Transportation, who the town hopes one day might fund the construction, has a "healthy transportation policy," Bazinet said.

That MassDOT funding would come through the Transportation Improvement Program, which is managed locally by the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. The design work underway now is being done with an eye toward going after TIP funding years down the road.

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