Four Seasons Books and the Byrd Center present: 

Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality 1920-2020
​with Dr. Elisabeth Griffith

Thursday, January 26 at 7:00 pm
Byrd Center Auditorium and virtually

Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920-2020 
chronicles the efforts of white and Black women to advance sometimes competing causes. The Nineteenth Amendment was an incomplete victory. Black and white women fought hard for voting rights and doubled the number of eligible voters, but the amendment did not enfranchise all women, or even protect the rights of those women who could vote. A century later, women are still grappling with how to use the vote and their political power to expand civil rights, confront racial violence, improve maternal health, advance educational and employment opportunities, and secure reproductive rights.

​In this riveting narrative, Dr. Elisabeth Griffith integrates the fight by white and Black women to achieve equality. From feminists and civil rights activists to politicians and social justice advocates, from working class women to mothers and homemakers, from radicals and conservatives to those who were offended by feminism, threatened by social change, or convinced of white supremacy, the diversity of the women’s movement mirrors America. Both engaging and outraging, Formidable will propel readers to continue their foremothers’ fights to achieve equality for all.

Elisabeth Griffith earned her PhD from The American University and an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College.  She has been a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia Teachers College. Dr. Griffith has spent her career working for women’s rights as an activist and an academic, teaching women’s history at the secondary and college level and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and professional journals.  She is currently teaching courses in women’s history at the Smithsonian Associates and Politics & Prose. She is the author of In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which was the inspiration for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, Not For Ourselves Alone.

​This event is sponsored by Shepherdstown's Four Seasons Books and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education. Copies of the book are available at Four Seasons Books and will also be available at the event.