The League of Women Voters of Montgomery County will honor the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote with a champagne celebration at the Lyric Theatre on Saturday, March 14, at 2 p.m.
The league invites everyone to a free showing of the award-winning film “Iron-Jawed Angels,” the story of some of the women who worked to secure the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States.
Chapter president Elizabeth Obenshain said everyone is invited to come see this film and then stay for the champagne toast after the film, which will take place around 4 p.m. The agenda calls for a few minutes of talking about the efforts to secure the right to vote both locally and across the state that will include a champagne toast to the pioneers’ success.
The celebration is co-sponsored by the League, the Lyric Theatre and the Montgomery-Radford-Floyd Branch of the NAACP.
Other celebratory events have been scheduled on into April and May. An exhibit of changes in women’s clothing is now on display at the Wallace Hall Gallery at Virginia Tech.
Saturday, March 21, at 10 a.m. at Warm Hearth Village Center, Virginia Tech and Radford University students and faculty will present a theater performance titled “Yellow Rose or Red Rose: Scenes from the Suffrage Movement.”
The local chapter of the league will host election analyst and forecaster Rachel Bitecofer at its annual meeting on Thursday, April 23, at the Warm Hearth Village Center. Bitecofer is a senior research fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. She also serves as assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University.
Saturday, May 2, between 0 a.m. and 2 p.m., Tech and RU students will present another theatrical performance, “Women and the Vote, at the Alexander Black House. Ongoing at the Alexander Black house will be a display coordinated by Grant Hamming that shows the history of the league.
Many different organizations will be creation programs in the days and months ahead to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. The Montgomery-Radford-Floyd Branch of the NAACP will be co-sponsoring many of the events.
