Dr. Jamie Bronstein will present a lecture entitled, “Ladies, Have You Heard?: The Strange History of the Equal Rights Amendment in New Mexico,” Thursday, March 9th at 1pm at the Branigan Cultural Center.
During her research on New Mexico history, Dr. Bronstein came upon a collection of telegrams in the governor’s papers from the archive up in Santa Fe. They were from women in 1972 and demanded a reform of New Mexico’s community property laws. Following up on her discovery, she found that there had been many requests for the reformation of the community property laws for many decades.
Her lecture will focus on the creation of New Mexico’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 and its own state equal rights amendment. The talk will also focus on how the equal rights movement was nearly derailed by a backlash of conservative women in the state on New Mexico, and the anti-ERA movement being transplanted from Texas to New Mexico.
Dr. Bronstein has been teaching at NMSU since graduating from Stanford University in 1996. She is the author of numerous articles and of five books: Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, 1999); Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in 19th-century Britain (Stanford, 2008); Transatlantic radical: John Francis Bray (Merlin, 2009); with Andrew Harris, Empire, State and Society: Modern Britain, 1830-present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of American Inequality (Prager, 2016). This most recent book chronicles the persistent history of social inequality in the United States from the American Revolution to the present.
Admission to the Branigan Cultural Center is free. The museum is located at 501 North Main Street and is open Tuesday – Friday from 10am to 4:30pm, Saturday from 9am to 4:30pm. For additional information, visit the website at: museums.las-cruces.org or call 575.541.2154.
If you need an accommodation for a disability to enable you to fully participate in this event, please contact the museum 48 hours prior to the event.