With: Sharon Spaulding

Class Fee: By donation/ registration required

Class Size: Maximum of 50 / Adults and children 8+ accompanied by an adult

Three remarkable and relatively unknown women will be highlighted in this discussion: Mary Ellen Pleasant, Mary Ware Dennett, and Zitkala-Sa. Known as the Mother of California Civil Rights, Pleasant was an illiterate, self-made millionaire who funded John Brown's insurrection at Harper's Ferry. Like Harriet Tubman, she repeatedly risked her life to guide slaves to freedom. Dennett, a trailblazing suffragist, reproductive rights, and sex education crusader, took on the federal government's obscenity laws in 1929. Zitkala-Sa was born in 1886, the year the Sioux defeated General George Custer at Little Big Horn. A feminist and activist for Native American rights and culture, she was also an author, educator, and musician. Her magazine stories and government reports uncovered the plot to murder Oklahoma's Osage Indians and steal their oil-rich lands.

Sharon Spaulding is a feminist historian who spotlights stories of remarkable women hidden in the shadows of history. She is at work on a book about suffragist and reproductive rights activist Mary Ware Dennett who challenged the U.S.government's obscenity laws and won. Sharon also publishes a newsletter, Women Make History: Stories we whould have learned in school. I Smithsonian, Ms. Magazine, and New Hampshire Magazine.