Women's Activism Archives - Public Seminar

Feminism

Our Bodies, Ourselves, Online

Historian and activist Saniya Lee Ghanoui explains how a feminist classic entered the twenty-first century

October 27, 2022 • by Saniya Lee Ghanoui and Claire Potter

When we started, we knew we needed experts from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Women and gender-expansive people from different races brought their own perspectives, personal and expert, and that would help us address racial health disparities. ...

Gender

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

October 11, 2022 • by Skye C. Cleary and Luis Jaramillo

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

History

When Welfare Was a Route to Community Empowerment in Las Vegas

In 1971, Black women workers seized control of their own destiny—and won

April 1, 2021 • by Annelise Orleck

_____ This month, Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a bill that seeks to address longstanding economic, educational, local government and health care needs that have become desperate during the pandemic. Even though it was missing key elements – a $15 federal minimum wage, and a lower cutoff for eligibility ...

When Welfare Was a Route to Community Empowerment in Las Vegas

Feature

The Power of Black Women’s Political Labor Remembered

Bennett College and the Civil Rights Movement

March 9, 2018 • by Jennifer Ash

Greensboro, North Carolina, is best known for the 1960 sit-ins that sparked a massive student movement to desegregate the South. Despite not being fully acknowledged as leaders in that movement, Black women students from Bennett College were vital to the political climate that made the sit-ins possible and sustained the ...