UPDATED: Nov. 6, 2017 at 6:45 p.m.

In 1848, at the birthplace of American feminism in Seneca Falls — a town 50 minutes west of Syracuse — a network of women legitimized the women’s suffrage movement, which would eventually grant white women the right to vote.

It’d take 72 years after the Seneca Falls Convention for women across the country to receive the right to vote through the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Women in New York state were granted the right 100 years ago, on Nov. 6, 1917, while the struggle to obtain the right raged on in other parts of the country. Today, women’s movements appear different than in the 20th century, but the motivating issues are largely the same.

Women demanded equal rights in the United States for decades before the 19th Amendment was ratified and are still demanding equality today. A century after New York women got the vote, American women still struggle to maintain health care and reproductive rights, face sexual assault and abuse and receive unequal pay in the workforce.

When Syracuse University was founded in 1870, Jesse Peck, the first Board of Trustees chairman, declared the university impartial, granting equal conditions of enrollment to women, according to the SU Archives.

Even though admission equality was granted, SU didn’t have a women’s studies program until 1976. It wasn’t until fall 2009 that the program was recognized as a department.

Since the department was established, the number of students studying women’s studies has doubled, said Susann DeMocker-Shedd, an administrative specialist for the women’s and gender studies department.

“When I started (in 2005), there were 200 seats throughout the academic year,” DeMocker-Shedd said.

Now, the department enrolls and fills 450 seats in its introductory courses throughout the fall, spring and summer semesters. However, DeMocker-Shedd explained, introductory women’s and gender studies courses don’t cover the women’s suffrage movement. In order to learn about that, students would have to enroll in a history class, she said.

At the start of her freshman year in 2013, Hannah-Abigail Mosier was eager to learn about suffragettes and feminism.

“When we say, OK, it’s been 100 years since women won the right to vote, we can see how far we’ve come, but we can also look at how far women haven’t come,” Mosier said.

Looking back on her time as a student, Mosier said studying feminism in an academic space is a privilege that is inaccessible to many communities.

“I majored and paid to go to school to learn about feminism, which seems kind of messed up,” she said.

Mosier found alternative ways to learn about women’s issues outside the classroom. She was attracted to underground newspapers and magazines, like Bitch Media, as a way to learn about activism on a college campus.

“Within people who do women’s studies, when talking about feminism, it’s easy to say feminism is about equality, but it reaches more people when you say it’s the critique of power,” Mosier said.

Recognizing the 100-year anniversary of the movement is an opportunity to revisit the story and dig a little deeper, said Sally Wagner, an adjunct professor in the Renée Crown University Honors Program and executive director at the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville.

As a feminist activist in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Wagner said she was unsatisfied with the flat and unempowering story that history had about the movement. Being active in the streets, Wagner realized she was fighting for the same issues and rights as her foremothers.

“I think that one of the big takeaways for me was that the movement was actually a very broad expansive multi-issue movement,” Wagner said. “It was all these other issues as well, and also, (the suffragettes) were much more kickass than I knew.”

Wagner added that in terms of women’s rights, authority and decision making, the U.S. ranks halfway compared to the rest of the world. While women in New York were legally allowed to vote 100 years ago, that decision marginalized women of color.

Native women, who had a political voice on Onondaga land for a thousand years, were not allowed a say in American society. The 19th Amendment also looked past black women, who didn’t receive the right to vote until 1965, Wagner said.

“We are a laughingstock in the eyes of the world because women in the United States do not have equal rights protected in the Constitution,” she said.

The U.S. is one of only seven members of the United Nations, according to CNN, that refuses The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which is essentially the international declaration of rights of women.

Wagner also questioned why 53 percent of white women used their right to vote in the 2016 election for President Donald Trump, whom she called “a serial sexual abuser.”

“That’s a sobering reality,” she said.

Many people in the U.S. still see women’s roles primarily as mothers and wives, said Carol Faulkner, an associate dean and professor of history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Faulkner said this perception is not reflective of women’s experiences throughout history.

“I think Americans continue to have uneasy relationships to women’s emergence into American public life and political equality,” Faulkner said.

For Faulkner, the main challenges in the feminist movement are consistency and coherence.  After the election, certain representations of feminism, including those of Hillary Clinton, did not necessarily represent all women and their experiences, she said.

Voting is important but it’s not enough, Faulkner added. She said it’s crucial to continue to pursue change in a variety of ways.

“I think students are at the forefront of change,” she said.

College campuses have historically fostered strong women activists. Change over time marks women’s continued desire to leave an impact on the institutions where they are present, she added.

Faulkner continually reminds SU students they live near a city that paved the way for American feminism.

“Even though the history of women’s suffrage is complicated and difficult and, to a certain extent, exclusive, it was an important milestone for the women’s movement,” Faulkner said.

As a recent SU graduate, Mosier is a Volunteers in Service to America volunteer through AmeriCorps and works for Women’s Resource Center Housing & Supportive Services in Washington. Through her work, she bears witness to modern American women’s issues in society.

When thinking about what 100 years represents, Mosier said there is still a lot of work to do.

“There’s an illusion that because women can vote, they are equal, but when we look at all the things that are going on, that is not the case,” she said. “We are not equal.”

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this post, Hannah-Abigail Mosier’s relationship with AmeriCorps and the Women’s Resource Center Housing & Supportive Services was unclear.

Published on November 5, 2017 at 9:43 pm

Contact Myelle: malansat@syr.edu