On Friday, March 8, 2024, the Gender, Politics, and Consumerism in a Global Context class, accompanied by their teacher, Dr. Christine Anderson, went on a field trip to Washington, DC to celebrate International Women’s Day. The attendees included Hiya Agrawal ’25, Naina Kondragunta ’24, Ally Lichtman ’25, Nina McGinnis ’24, Cory Wagaman-Eure ’24, and Jillian Wilson ’25.
They visited the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial which tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. It sits on the site of the old Occoquan Workhouse and Prison in Lorton, VA where suffragists were imprisoned and forced fed.
The group also visited the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument which was the headquarters for the National Women’s Party or militant suffragists led by Alice Paul, and the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House which was the first headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) of which she was President. Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator, the first African-American woman to serve as a college president, a civil rights champion, the first African-American woman to head a federal agency under the Roosevelt administration, and a contemporary and friend of Maggie Lena Walker.
