Author Archives: Bella

Along with the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020 came the opportunity to discuss the evolution of women’s rights, civil rights and voting rights. Importantly, it continues to offer a chance to focus on the racial, geographic, periodical and political diversity of the suffrage movement, and particularly through the lens of lesser-known activists, publications and ideas that made headlines more than a century ago. In its own time and in its legacies, mediation of the suffrage movement constructed public debates about citizenship – about enfranchisement, representation and political agency – that remain vividly in motion today.

Dr. Carolyn Kitch, the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Journalism and a member of the faculty of the Media and Communication Doctoral Program at Klein College of Media and Communication, recently published a collection of research along with 12 other women scholars titled Front Lines, Front Pages: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage. In the book, Dr. Kitch and others explore the less visible depths of the women’s suffrage movement, exploring the active role of media in shaping public understandings of that movement’s purpose and fate. During a recent installment of the Office of Research and Graduate Studies’ Spring 2021 Graduate Speaker Series, Dr. Kitch spoke about how public memory has transformed the suffrage story over time, in predictable ways but also, amid recent events, in some unexpected ways. The lecture continued into a conversation of how to practice intersectionality in news history research, with a fascinating discussion between Dr. Kitch and Professor of Journalism Dr. Karen Turner ensuing.

Kitch’s work has spanned disciplines outside of media, as a current faculty fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Temple, and as author, co-author or co-editor of five books, as well more than 70 articles and chapters about journalism history, public memory, magazines and gender issues in media.

Watch the full workshop on TUTV this Wednesday, July 14 at 1 and 9 p.m.