Simpson College announces speaker for annual Women in America Lecture

Simpson College (simpson.edu) announced award-winning author and woman’s suffrage expert Sara Egge as the speaker for the annual Women in America Lecture on Wednesday, March 4, 2020. The event begins at 1 p.m. in Hubbell Hall at Kent Campus Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Egge’s lecture titled, “Radical Women Go Back to Your Homes: The Fight for Woman Suffrage in Iowa and the Midwest,” focuses on untangling the complex history of woman suffrage while revealing the complicated legacies of the Nineteenth Amendment. She examines how women in Iowa labored for the right to vote for decades before, in the 1910s, crafting a compelling argument that their votes represented “responsible citizenship.”

Egge is the Claude D. Pottinger Professor of History at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Her research explores the woman suffrage movement in the Great Plains and the Midwest. Her book, “Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920,” won the Gita Chaudhuri Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians and the Benjamin Shambaugh Award from the State Historical Society of Iowa for the best book about Iowa history. She received her Ph.D. from Iowa State University and her bachelor’s degree from North Dakota State University.

About the Women in America Lecture
Since 1990, the Women in America Lecture has been the keynote event for Women’s History Month at Simpson College. The sponsors for this year’s lecture are the Women’s and Gender Studies program, the Culver Center and the Iowa History Center. Additional support is provided by Simpson Forum.

About Simpson College
Simpson College is located in Indianola, Iowa, a short drive from Iowa’s capital city of Des Moines. Founded in 1860, Simpson College has approximately 1,300 full-time undergraduate students and approximately 400 part-time students. Simpson also has a campus in West Des Moines serving primarily adult learners. Simpson offers 80 majors and minors, is a member of the NCAA Division III American Rivers Conference, hosts eight Greek houses on campus and sponsors many extracurricular options for student involvement.