Council of Advisors

Awarded one of the first doctorates in the country for work in women’s studies (UC Santa Cruz) and a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States (CSU Sacramento), Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner has taught women’s studies courses for 51 years.  The Founder/Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, she teaches in Syracuse University’s Honors Program and California State University, Sacramento’s Women and Gender Studies department.

A major historian of the suffrage movement, Dr. Wagner is active on the national scene.  She appeared on the CNN Special Report: Women Represented and CNN’s Quest’s World of Wonder.  She has been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, Nation and Time Magazine, among others.  Her recent articles appeared in the New York Daily News, Ms. Magazine, the National Women’s History Alliance newsletter and National Suffrage Centennial Commission blog. In March 2021, the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian featured the film, Without a Whisper which traces Dr. Wagner’s research demonstrating the Haudenosaunee influence on the suffrage movement through her friendship with Wakerakats:te, the Mohawk Bear Clan Mother. She appeared in and wrote the faculty guide for the Ken Burns’ documentary, “Not for Ourselves Alone.” 

A prolific author, Dr. Wagner’s anthology The Women's Suffrage Movement, with a Forward by Gloria Steinem (Penguin Classics, 2019), unfolds a new intersectional look at the 19th century woman’s rights movement.  Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (Native Voices, 2001) documents the surprisingly unrecognized authority of Native women, who inspired the suffrage movement. It was followed by her young reader’s book, We Want Equal Rights: How Suffragists Were Influenced by Native American Women (Native Voices, 2020).

Among her awards, Dr. Wagner was selected as a 2020 New York State Senate Woman of Distinction, one of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s E-News in 2015 and she received the Katherine Coffey Award for outstanding service to museology from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums in 2012.