Events

In this solo session, former Columbia City Councilwoman Belinda Gergel will engage author and historian Marjorie Spruill in a discussion about her most recent work, Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics, published in 2017.

Marjorie Spruill is Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of South Carolina. A historian, she is well known for her work on women and politics from the woman suffrage movement to the present as well as her work on the history of the American South. Most recently Spruill is the author of the highly acclaimed Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury 2017) which addresses the rise of the modern women’s rights movement to a peak period of success, the mobilization of social conservatives in opposition, and the impact on American political culture. Over the past year Spruill has traveled widely to speak about the book, including at the Carter and Clinton presidential libraries and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the British Association for American Studies, and in a five city “tour de France” and on France 24 television. In November she gave the keynote address at the conference celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, which Spruill describes in her book as a transformative event in US political history.

Belinda F. Gergel is the former Chair of the History and Political Science Department at Columbia College. She has authored numerous works on South Carolina history. A former member of the Columbia City Council and president of the Historic Columbia Foundation, she now resides in Charleston, SC.