Visiting scholar Laurie Green will present a lecture, Women’s Liberation through a Different Prism: The View from Austin, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 31, in the Highsmith Student Union Mountain Suites. This event, part of UNC Asheville’s observance of Women’s History Month, is free and open to everyone. Green is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
About the lecture
Do geography and historical context mean more than we have acknowledged when it comes to narratives of the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement. Have we accepted narratives that emanate from the urban Northeast and Midwest as universals, rather than particular perspectives? And if so, what are the historical consequences? From the vantage point of students and other activists in 1960s and 1970s’ Austin, Texas, for example, the argument that radical feminists abandoned the New Left to establish their own movement – renditions of which appear in most historical overviews of the Women’s Liberation Movement – may not make sense, nor did such activists look to New York and Chicago feminists as the engines for Roe v. Wade; instead, they looked to themselves as the initiators of the case that went to the Supreme Court.
In 2017, Laurie Green launched the intergenerational Austin Women Activists Oral History Project at the University of Texas, which has brought together students of today and women activists in the 1960s and 1970s, along with faculty and staff from different parts of the university. The project has resulted in a digital oral history collection, a film, and other productions that call some of the now-familiar narratives of the Women’s Liberation Movement into question. Her talk will be based, in part, on this collaborative endeavor.
About the presenter
Laurie Green is an associate professor of history and faculty affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, American Studies Department, and African and African Diaspora Studies Department. She is the author of Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle, (University of North Carolina, 2007), winner of the 2008 Philip Taft Labor History Award, and co-editor of Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). She is completing a book manuscript titled “The Discovery of Hunger in America: A Public Crisis of Race, Health, and American Democracy.”
Visitor Parking on the UNC Asheville Campus – Visitors may park in faculty/staff and non-resident lots from 5:00 p.m. until 7:30 a.m., Monday through Friday, and all day on weekends, holidays, and campus breaks. Visitors are not permitted to park in resident student lots at any time.
For more information, please contact Caitlin Manely in UNC Asheville’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, [email protected] or 828.251.6634.