How American Women Won the Vote — Keynote for Women’s Fund of Greater La Crosse

Johanna Neuman is one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of women’s suffrage. An award-winning historian and a scholar in residence at American University, she has written two books and several monographs on the topic. She often lectures about the long campaign by American women to win the vote, from the revolutionary fervor of the American Revolution in the 1770s to the call for justice during the Civil Rights Movement two centuries later. Chronicling one of the broadest coalitions for social change in American history, she brings delights in illuminating personalities – from the white colonialists who wanted the Constitutional Convention to offer them political privileges, to the black activists who fought Jim Crow laws in the South to protect their constitutional rights to vote.

A journalist who covered the White House, State Department and Congress for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, Johanna won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, served as president of the White House Correspondents Association and specialists in writing advance obituaries of political figures in Washington, D.C. After her journalism career, she returned to the academe, earning a PhD in history from American University in 2016.