Featuring: The keynote Address by Women’s Historian Alice Kessler Harris, distinguished professor at Columbia University and Author of A Difficult Woman The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

Round table discussion about the life and work of Amy Swerdlow and Gerda Lerner moderated by Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt Volumes 1 and 2.

Amy Swerdlow (1923-2012), graduate and former director of the women’s history graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College was a scholar, activist, teacher, mentor and mother. She was a founding member and a significant force in Women Strike for Peace, a grassroots movement that greatly influenced the end of above ground nuclear weapons testing, especially emphasizing the effect this had on children’s health. The organization went on to protest the Vietnam War. Amy Swerdlow sat on the national board of the antiwar group known as Clergy and Laity Concerned, chaired the steering committees of two antiwar coalitions of women’s groups, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade and the Women’s Emergency Coalition, and was a member of the New York State coordinating council of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Amy Swerdlow was the quintessential activist scholar.

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) was co-founder of the women’s history graduate program at Sarah Lawrence and a pioneer in the field of women’s history. It was out of the 1979 Summer Institute at Sarah Lawrence organized by Gerda and the Women’s Action Alliance that Women’s History Week, later Women’s History Month, was born. Gerda Lerner leaves a prestigious legacy of scholarship. She was committed to making visible the ignored and debased, debunking the mythology of the unimportance and inaction of the underrepresented. Her groundbreaking Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, for example, forever shattered elite ideas of who makes history and whose history matters.

The Fifteenth Annual Women’s History Conference at Sarah Lawrence College honors Gerda Lerner and Amy Swerdow’s life and work as committed and indomitable activist/scholars by making issues of peace and justice its central theme.

We still face unending war, economic injustice, potential environmental catastrophe, militarism, institutionalized racism, hunger, homophobia and sexism among other issues. By taking a multi-disciplinary approach, we will explore issues of global peace and justice from a variety of perspectives. We seek to understand the ways in which activists have organized around these issues now and in the past and ask the following questions: What are the issues activists have faced in the past and how might we learn from previous movements? How do current issues intersect and interact and how can activists combine forces to confront these problems and work for social change? With the spirit of Amy Swerdlow and Gerda Lerner as our legacy, can we find the energy and focus to move forward together?

Panel Discussions Include:

Uses of Space: Women’s Global and Local Resistance

Women’s Educational Activism

Transnational Peace Activism

Women’s Efforts for Peace in the U.S. and Great Britain

Women’s LGBT Activism

Women Power for Peace: Linkages in Domestic and International Anti-War and Anti-Imperialist Activism During the Vietnam Era

For more information contact:
Tara Elise James
tjames@sarahlawrence.edu
(914) 395-2405

Register:

http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/womens-history/conference/registration.html

LIKE us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WomensHistoryProgramAtSarahLawrenceCollege

Developed at Bryn Mawr College, the site will serve scholars in the US and across the world by providing free, open access to materials related to the history of women’s education. The site is a portal to a wide range of digitized items selected from our collections, as well as materials that we are featuring through collaboration with archives at other schools. In addition to primary sources, the site features thematic exhibits on notable figures and themes from the college’s history, and lesson plans created by Temple University students as part of the Cultural Collaboration Fieldwork Initiative. As the site grows, we will build its capacity as a guide to other related resources around the web for interested scholars and students.

We are also announcing a Call for Papers for ‘Women’s History in the Digital World’, to be held at Bryn Mawr College, March 22 and 23, 2013. We are honored to have as our keynote Professor Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture and a Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M. The conference will bring together experienced and new scholars from across the globe who are working on women’s history projects with a digital component, exploring the complexities of creating, managing, researching and teaching with digital resources. Please email abstracts (200 words max) and a bio (100 words max) to greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu by December 14th, 2012.

We welcome all comments and suggestions and encourage other institutions to consider partnering with us on themes of common interest. For all feedback and inquiries please contact the Director, Jennifer Redmond, at jredmond@brynmawr.edu, and follow us on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE for further updates.

Using scholar interviews, archival materials, and dramatic reenactments based on her original writings, AUTUMN GEM brings the story of Qiu Jin to life. The hour-long film was produced and directed by two San Francisco Bay Area Chinese American filmmakers, Rae Chang and Adam Tow. It stars former China National martial arts champion and Hollywood stunt actress Li Jing.

AUTUMN GEM has screened at over 100 venues worldwide, including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Brown, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of British Columbia, and Australian National University.

As 2012 marks the centenary of the end of imperial rule in China, it is especially crucial to acknowledge the role of women in the country’s transition to a modern nation. AUTUMN GEM sheds light on a remarkable figure who continues to serve as an inspiration to Chinese women today.

San Francisco Bay Area Screenings

All events are free and open to the general public. For full details please visit http://autumn-gem.com

MARCH
March 1: San Jose State University
March 2: Atherton Library
March 6: Fremont Library
March 8: Foster City Library
March 10: Cupertino Library
March 11: Livermore Library
March 12: Los Altos Library
March 14: San Carlos Library
March 18: Mountain View Library
March 21: Sunnyvale Library
March 27: Campbell Library
March 28: San Jose King Library
March 31: Dublin Library

APRIL
April 7: Berryessa Library
April 24: Evergreen Library
April 25: Alameda Library

MAY
May 1: Belmont Library
May 2: Millbrae Library
May 10: Burlingame Library
May 12: Pacifica Sharp Park Library

As students, teachers, mentors and professionals, women from Parsons have been at the forefront of design study and practice since the school’s founding in 1896. INSPIRING WOMEN offers glimpses into the education and professional lives of 16 women who attended and taught at Parsons between the 1910s and the 1990s. Through original design work, photographs, notebooks, publicity materials, correspondence, clippings and business records, INSPIRING WOMEN explores changes in the worlds of graphic, interior and fashion design over the course of the 20th century, changes often spearheaded by Parsons’ women as they broke new creative and professional ground, mentored and promoted one another, experimented with new modes of representation, and won expanded opportunity and recognition for women in design.

INSPIRING WOMEN is being held in conjunction with the conference, NO LONGER IN EXILE: The Legacy and Future of Gender Studies at The New School, which will take place adjacent to the exhibit in the Theresa Lang Center, March 26-27, 2010. This exhibition was made possible in part with support from Parsons’ School of Art and Design History and Theory.

Exhibition held at The New School, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY and continuing from March 29-May 31 at Gimbel Library, Parsons The New School for Design
2 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor.

FREE. For more information, please contact kac [at] newschool.edu

I’d like to let you know that HistoryNet Website recently added a special section on Women’s History. HistoryNet is part of the Weider History Group, the largest history-oriented magazine publisher in the world, and this special section will help visitors more easily find many articles that originally appeared in magazines such as American History, Wild West, Military History, Vietnam, etc. The site also invites visitors to add to a list of recommended books and other reference resources on women’s history and to name some personal favorites among historical women. These comments can help determine future original content.

The Women’s History section can be found at http://www.historynet.com/topics/womens-history

The National Women’s History Project is one of HistoryNet‘s recommended resources, by the way. HistoryNet thank its organizers for allowing us to share this information with its visitors.