Each week during the month of March, WRVO Public Media will air an episode each of "Amended" from Humanities New York in honor of Women's History Month. The series travels from the 1800s to the present day to show us a quest for women's full equality that has always been as diverse, complex and unfinished as the nation itself.
Episode 2: Any Woman
The right to vote was only one of many demands that women made prior to the Civil War. Zooming in on another priority, the right to bodily autonomy, changes our understanding of who was at the forefront of the struggle for women’s rights.
Host Laura Free, a historian of women and politics, travels to Baltimore, Maryland, to spend a day with legal historian Martha S. Jones. They visit the Homewood Museum, a 19th-century mansion once owned by a family of enslavers, to grapple with its legacy of slavery and sexual violence through the story of one enslaved resident, Charity Castle. Then Martha tells the stories of Celia (whose last name is unknown) and Harriet Jacobs, two other enslaved women who courageously fought for control of their own bodies within legal systems that denied them that right. Although few today know their names, Martha makes the case that all three women were part of the “vanguard” of women’s rights activism.
Listen Sunday, March 14 at 7 p.m. on WRVO, on-air and online.
