Women of the Hall

Live lecture at the Hall: Alison Parker on Mary Church Terrell
2025-10-18 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | National Women’s Hall of Fame, 1 Canal Street, Seneca Falls, NY, 13148, United States
Leadership & Representation: Mary Church Terrell’s Black Feminism
Mary Church Terrell’s biographer, Alison Parker, discusses Terrell’s strategic use of respectability and fashion to assert Black women’s full humanity and equality. Terrell’s feminism and suffrage activism was based on her communicating the central reality that race and gender are intersecting and inseparable factors in Black women’s lives.
Mary Church Terrell was a tireless advocate for racial justice, women’s rights, and civil rights — a visionary leader whose work spanned nearly a century. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about her unrelenting fight for equality and what her story teaches us today.
About our speaker:
Alison M. Parker is Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. She has research and teaching interests in U.S. women’s and gender history, African American history, and legal history. She majored in art history and history at the University of California, Berkeley and earned a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2017-2018, Parker was an Andrew W. Mellon Advanced Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University.
Among other books, Parker is author of Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (2010) and Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933 (1997). This year, her biography, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell, was released by the University of North Carolina Press in a second edition paperback. Dr. Parker also serves as an editor of the Gender and Race in American History book series for the University of Rochester Press.

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