Women’s Rights National Historical Park (NHP) will hold Virtual Convention Days 2021: From the Pages to the Streets, a series of online programs being held July 16 through 18, 2021.
Convention Days has been a signature event in Seneca Falls for many years. This annual event allows visitors to engage with women’s history, focusing on the revolutionary 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention through art, storytelling, speakers, and special programming. The park will continue this tradition virtually this year due to COVID-19.
This year’s Convention Days theme, “From the Pages to the Streets,” focuses on how women’s writing in the first wave of the women’s rights movement translated into powerful activism and real social change.
“The Declaration of Sentiments was only one of the significant writings that helped further the movement toward equality for women,” said Event Coordinator, Stephanie Freese. “Articles in newspapers, personal correspondence, satire, poetry, and even journals motivated others to support the cause, and help us better understand the intentions of suffragists.”
This year’s keynote speaker is author and scholar Ellen Carol DuBois, one of the nation’s leading historians of women’s fight for the vote. She taught at the University of Buffalo and, for the last three decades, at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book, published by Simon and Schuster in February 2020, is Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote. This is the first comprehensive history of the 75-year-long U.S. woman suffrage movement to appear in more than a half century.
Online dialogue and a live question-and-answer session following the keynote will allow virtual visitors to participate in discussions about the impact those words from the past continue to have on women’s rights today. Living history portrayals, along with presentations by scholars, artists, and park rangers, will aim to provide context and insight into lives and choices of those activists for social change.
This year, the Friends of Women’s Rights National Historical Park, the National Park Service, and the Seven Valleys Writing Project will also be hosting “Writing for Empowerment,” a virtual writing workshop, as part of the commemoration. This workshop will give participants an opportunity to discover their own voice and explore the tools used to fight for social justice – before the internet and social media.
A schedule of events, including full details of the weekend’s programs, and workshop registration information, is available on the park website http://www.nps.gov/wori/planyourvisit/virtual_convention_days_2021. htm and Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/
womensrightsnps/.
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