Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to kick off fundraising effort for Ohio women's suffrage monument

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will kick off a fundraising campaign on Thursday for a monument to women's suffrage being planned in Ohio.

“An Evening With Doris Kearns Goodwin” will take place in the Ohio Statehouse atrium. Megan Wood, CEO and executive director of the Ohio History Connection, the state's history office, will lead a discussion with the historian followed by a question-and-answer session.

Kearns Goodwin plans to discuss her eighth book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” which was published in April. The book is a reflection on her final years with her longtime husband, Richard Goodwin, a former White House speechwriter who died in 2018, and on the singular era they lived through. The two were married for 42 years.

Richard Goodwin was an aide and speechwriter to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who helped coin the phrase “The Great Society.” Doris Kearns was a White House Fellow who later helped Johnson work on his memoir, “The Vantage Point.”

The event marks the official start of a $2 million capital campaign organized by the Capitol Square Foundation and the Women's Suffrage Monument Commission to support construction of the monument by 2026. Nationally, fewer than 8% of public statues depict real women.

State lawmakers created the commission in 2019, ahead of the 100th anniversary of ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920. However, Statehouse rules drafted amid political tensions in 2020 imposed a new waiting period of five years on erecting any new monuments on Statehouse grounds.

A committee agreed last week to waive the final few months of the waiting period for the suffrage monument. That may allow the commission to, for the first time, share some details about the sculpture, such as the artist who's been chosen to create it, at Thursday's event.