Cahill travels to England to commemorate suffrage

Bernadette Cahill, sometime resident of Rayville, is returning home to Britain to help commemorate the hundred years since some British women finally won the vote. 

She will speak on Feb. 3 at a commemorative conference in Cambridge University, England.  

Scottish-born and educated Cahill will also speak on Feb. 6 in a town that for years headquartered a suffragette campaign in Scotland – exactly 100 years to the day the parliamentary bill which finally recognized the principle of votes for women became law by enfranchising married women and female property holders. 

British women won equal voting rights with men only in 1928, after a struggle of 61 years. American women won the right to vote only with ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920, after a struggle of 72 years. 

 Cahill is married to former Rayville resident Ronald E. Davis, Director of Vicksburg Municipal Airport. She is an Honors M.A. graduate of History from Glasgow University. An independent scholar, Cahill is author of Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Right to Vote: The First Civil Rights Struggle of the 20th Century, and Arkansas Women and the Right to Vote: The Little Rock Campaigns, (both 2015). 

She is currently finalizing her third history of women’s struggle to win the right to vote in the United States. 

The new book deals with American women’s campaigns for female suffrage 150 years ago during Reconstruction. She has given many talks and has published numerous articles on women’s rights and the United States suffrage movement. 

Cahill hosted classical music when Public Radio in Northeast Louisiana was launched, later producing and hosting “Memories” on KEDM. She has occasionally contributed women’s history articles to the Richland Beacon-News.   

Her talks in Britain draw on a unique tape recording she made with a source in 1984 after hearing, during the 50th anniversary of the now century-old voting rights Act, the woman’s story of her summer job alongside one of the most notorious of the pre-First World War militant Suffragettes. 

She hopes she will stir some forgotten memories and lead to the discovery of further unknown sources, particularly photographs of suffragettes in action. 

“It’s frustrating that so much women’s history has been forgotten, while documents and photos have been discarded when the women have died because people didn’t know how valuable they were – especially when the women remained single, as was so often the case,” Cahill said. “This is as true here in the United States as in Scotland.” 

Cahill has been working since 2007 to bring attention to the upcoming centenary in 2020 of American women’s civil rights struggle.