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.

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.”

In an interview, Goodwin said she hopes to emphasize at the event that history can provide valuable perspective in tumultuous times. The talk of American democracy being in peril that permeated the recent election cycle is nothing new. It occurred before the Civil War, during the Great Depression, in the early days of World War II and in the 1960s, which she's written about most recently.

Each of those times “ended with the right answer,” she said, but “they didn't know it.”

“They lived like we did, not knowing how the chapter would end," she said. "But I'd like to believe that that's why history gives us a certain kind of hope and faith that we've been through these really hard times before and come through — not only come through and endured, but we've come through with greater strength.”

Goodwin said culling through the 300 boxes from the 1960s that her husband had assembled to write the book left her buoyed, despite the reminders of the assassinations and the sadness with which the decade ended.

“I think that the fundamental theme of the 1960s was that people believed that they could make a difference,” she said. “And that's really important in a democracy that citizens mobilize for what they believe in.”

Thursday's 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.