Dr. Shannon Risk, professor of history at Niagara University, presented a lecture based on her book, “The Life and Times of Elizabeth Upham Yates: Crusader for Women’s Suffrage, Temperance, and Missionary Work” at the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Mass., on June 29, 2024.
Dr. Risk’s book chronicles the work Yates did as one of Susan B. Anthony’s “lieutenants” in the women’s suffrage movement. After an early career as a missionary to China, a university student, and a burgeoning popular lecturer in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Yates began speaking at crucial 1890s suffrage battlegrounds in California, South Dakota, and throughout the South. She used her varied skills to navigate the early 20th century, bringing her leadership to Rhode Island, where the women succeeded in bringing presidential suffrage in 1917, and later ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. In the last decade of the suffrage battle, Yates lived with brittle bone disease, chronicling her infirmities in her letters to her best friend, Alice Stone Blackwell, which mingled with her active work for the vote.
“Yates helped define the post-suffrage era for reformers, navigating social causes, political candidacy, and old age,” said Dr. Risk. “Her suffrage sisters in the National American Woman Suffrage Association celebrated her as a ‘prophet and a dreamer’ in the final volumes of the history of woman suffrage.”
Dr. Risk joined Niagara University in 2009, where she directs the public history minor as well as the M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her current research focuses on organizational structures of U.S. progressive-era women’s rights organizations. She holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in history from the University of Maine, and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Northern Iowa.
