On Wednesday, April 19, the Pompey Historical Society will host Fayetteville historian and Matilda Joslyn Gage House senior docent Susan Boland to speak on the life and times of Fayetteville suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage.

The event will be held at 7 p.m. at the Pompey Town Hall, on the corner of Route 20 and Pompey Center Road. Members of the general public as well as PHS members are invited to hear Boland’s remarks on “The Power of Women: Matilda Joslyn Gage and the New York Women’s Vote of 1880.”

Even though 2017 is the centennial of women’s right to vote across New York State, women have been voting, legally and illegally, in New York since 1868, says Boland. The life of Matilda Joslyn Gage demonstrates the activism of those New York women, and how they gained and used their early limited rights. Most importantly, her story illustrates the courage of women who went outside their traditional domestic sphere for the first time and took on a public role under harsh circumstances.

Boland describes the voting effort in Gage’s hometown of Fayetteville as a microcosm of the national suffrage movement, illustrating many of the victories and setbacks that suffragists experienced throughout the struggle for full voting rights for women.