Historian and Queens alumna Robin Morris will give the 2022 Preyer Lecture on the topic: "Why isn't there an Equal Rights Amendment?". The lecture will be preceded by a reception in the foyer outside of Ketner Auditorium beginning at 5:45pm.

Dr. Morris is Associate Professor of History at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia where she teaches courses in modern US history, Southern history, and public history. She holds a PhD in History from Yale University, an MA in Southern Studies from University of Mississippi, and a BA from Queens University of Charlotte.  Prior to graduate study, Morris was an educator at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina and a middle school social studies teacher in Tunica, Mississippi.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have revived questions and debates about women's relationship to the US Constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment stopped just three states short of ratification in 1982. This talk examines the grassroots work of women who organized in opposition to the ERA including why they opposed equal rights and how they defeated an amendment that looked certain to pass. Prof. Morris will draw from the themes of her recent book Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right which traces women's grassroots political activism from the foundation of the Georgia Federation of Republican Women in the 1950s through the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s.