Students in the Spotlight

Posted July 2nd, 2008

Shannon Risk is a 2008-2009 Fullbright Fellow. Shannon's Dissertation Title is: "In Order to Establish Justice": The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement in Maine and New Brunswick

Her study will explore whether or not the U.S.-Canadian border loomed large in the formation of nineteenth-century women's political struggle to attain the vote. This project will also demonstrate that, despite the formation of female political organizations in the more urban areas of Maine and New Brunswick, the suffrage movement was sustained by women (and men) in rural areas. Finally, my project will attempt to explain how citizenship, and the rights of citizenship were perceived in Maine and New Brunswick during the woman suffrage movement, and how those ideas played out well into the twentieth century. This project is significant in that it counters the assumption that progressive ideas only flow from urban areas, it demonstrates detailed study of women's political behavior across a national border in a field that has neglected this topic, and it shows the strategies of a disfranchised group to pressure the male political system, in many respects, by creating its own political power structure.