Williamstown League of Women Voters Annual Susan B. Anthony Dinner

11:22AM / Thursday, March 05, 2026Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — "The Strange Career of the 14th Amendment" is speaker Sara Dubow's topic for the Williamstown League of Women Voters annual Susan B. Anthony Dinner on March 18.

Sara Dubow is a professor of history at Williams College, where she teaches courses in women's and gender history, recent U.S. history, and legal history. Her first book, "Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America" (Oxford University Press, 2010) won the 2011 Bancroft Prize.

Dubow will be providing background to the amendment's ratification after the Civil War and its current position of controversy in the wake of President Trump's Executive Order that claims to eliminate birthright citizenship guaranteed by the amendment, stated the press release.

Her talk will examine selected cases from three key periods in 14th Amendment jurisprudence — the 1880s and 1890s; the 1950s and 1960s, and the 2020s — as a vantage point for understanding the Supreme Court's role in expanding and contracting the possibilities of the amendment as imagined at its ratification.

The 14th Amendment is especially relevant to the League and to Susan B. Anthony because the women's suffrage movement endured a split over its ratification. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed it because, although it guaranteed citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, it specified they had to be "male" in order to vote. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe worked for its passage and formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, while Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. That rift healed eventually, but it was many years between the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the 19th Amendment finally granting women the vote in 1920.

The League's Susan B. Anthony Dinner will be at the Williams Faculty Club, 968 Main St. in Williamtown at 5:30 p.m. on March 18. Tickets for the buffet dinner cost $55 and must be reserved in advance at zrobi@hotmail.com. Deadline for reservations is March 11.

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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

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