SALISBURY — The English Speaking Union Salisbury Branch is holding its first program of the year: Women’s Suffrage in North Carolina at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 17. 

With voting rights much in the news these days, one group has every reason to celebrate: women. Although it came 144 years after the founding of America, 2020 marked the centennial of women’s suffrage, giving our “fairer sex” the right to vote. However, did you know North Carolina was almost last to actually sign off on the 19^th amendment, doing so more than 50 years later?

Mississippi waited 13 more years to sign off on it.

What took us so long? The route the amendment took from languishing in the legislative “Committee on Insane Asylums,” to ratification in 1920, to the state’s final approval. It is quite a unique story, one that N.C. History Museum curator RaeLana Poteat will share through the eyes and ears of the men and women who fought for and against it. March is also “Women’s History Month,” so what better way to celebrate it?

Reservations for the dinner at the Country Club of Salisbury are $40 each and the deadline is Monday, March 14.