August 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the high water mark of the Women’s Suffrage movement with the adoption of the 19th Amendment securing the right to vote for millions of women in this country, but sadly not much first-hand account audio of this historic achievement exists. In this edition of WUKY's award-winning history program, Saving Stories, Nunn Center Director Dr. Doug Boyd shares audio from a 1990 interview with Austin P. Lilly, daughter of Kentucky suffragette Anna Dudley McGinn Lilly. Austin and her mother attended the 1920 National American Women's Suffrage Association Convention in Chicago; along with a who's who of other Kentucky notables including Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and Sophonisba Breckenridge.
At that convention the organization officially folded and eventually morphed into the League of Women Voters. Madeline McDowell Breckinridge was the first LWV President. You can read more about Austin P. Lilly in a newly released book by Terry Birdwhistell and Deirdre Scaggs, “Our Rightful Place: A History of Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880—1945.”
