Fox Chapel event honors Women's History Month with local author Eliza Smith Brown

Pittsburgh author Eliza Smith Brown will mark Women’s History Month in March with a personal tale of two females who transformed the local political landscape.

Brown will lead a discussion of formidable sisters Lucy and Eliza Kennedy — her grandmother and great aunt, respectively — who came of age in Gilded Age Pittsburgh.

“I love telling their story, not only because it is personal, but because I think it demands to be told,” said Brown, author of “She Devils at the Door.”

The book follows the Kennedy sisters after their graduation from Vassar College and their fight to lead the suffrage movement.

Brown will be the guest speaker at a program by the Fox Chapel Area affiliate of the American Association of University Women. The event is at 10 a.m. March 11 at Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church.

It is free and open to the public.

“It’s important that people realize how long and hard women fought for the right to vote,” Brown, of Squirrel Hills, said. “We must thereby take it seriously. It is a right, an obligation, to have our voices be heard.”

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Brown studied historic preservation at Cornell University. She has served on boards at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, Neighborhood Academy, St. Edmund’s Academy and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

While the program is Brown’s first program with AAUW, she is a familiar face on the Pittsburgh book circuit.

Particularly, “She Devils at the Door” tells the story of how the Kennedy sisters altered the course of local “business-as-usual” on multiple fronts, Brown said.

After women won the right to vote, the pair spent decades fighting corruption in local government. Brown believes their efforts dramatically improved the lives of generations of Pittsburgh women.

In 2020, Brown was able to celebrate their achievements on a large scale by chairing a city-wide initiative with the Pittsburgh Mayor’s office to mark the Suffrage Centennial.

With Women’s History Month, it is a perfect time to celebrate the contributions of her family, and all women, to events in history and contemporary society, Brown said.

“I believe it is timely to celebrate the rights we have,” Brown said.