CBH Talk | Women + Justice Part 1: Yesterday
This March, join CBH for two virtual programs exploring the intersecting struggle for gender equality and racial justice. Co-presented with the Ms. Foundation for Women in honor of their 50th anniversary, Part 1 looks at yesterday.
The last 50 years have seen transformational change in what being a woman in America means, with vast advances around gender freedom in work, education, family, sexuality, sports, and more. Yet from the start the fight was only partially representative, the achievements only partly complete. Those at the table excluded the full range of women’s voices and concerns, especially those of women of color.
Join us for a conversation that brings historical context to this five-decade battle for gender equity as we look at the entrenched structural and societal inequalities, the hard-won gains, and the women left out. Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, 2020 MacArthur Fellow and author of the critically acclaimed book THICK: And Other Essays, moderates this panel that includes groundbreaking cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft, feminist legal scholar Patricia J. Williams, and Ms. Foundation leader Sara K. Gould.
To register for Part 2 which explores today and tomorrow, click HERE.
Participants
Barbara Brandon-Croft was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. After debuting her comic strip Where I’m Coming From in the Detroit Free Press in 1989, Brandon-Croft became the first Black woman cartoonist to be published nationally by a major syndicate. During its 15 year run, Where I’m Coming From appeared in over 65 newspapers across the USA and Canada, as well as Jamaica, South Africa, and Barbados. Her comics provide sharp social commentary on Black womanhood, capturing the voices and perspectives of Black women during that era. They are in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. Brandon-Croft lives in Queens. Photo by Theresa Dillon.
Sara K. Gould is a past president & CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women. Beginning her 25 year tenure at the Foundation in 1986 as founding director of the Economic Development Program, she served as president & CEO from 2004 to 2010. Sara led the Foundation in developing cross-issue, movement building grantmaking initiatives centering the voices and perspectives of low-income women and women of color.
After leaving the Foundation, Sara was a senior fellow in social justice philanthropy at The Atlantic Philanthropies, and then served for two years as associate director of Caring Across Generations. She co-founded and co-directed the Steinem Initiative at Smith College, a pilot program experimenting with the use of women’s and gender history as an organizing tool to strengthen today’s gender and racial justice movements. The Initiative resulted in two large-scale digital history projects, designed with activists, in the fields of domestic worker organizing and reproductive justice. These projects are making countless untold stories and histories of women of color activists and organizers accessible to social justice leaders and their organizations across the country.
Currently Sara serves as the Interim Executive Director of the National Immigration Law Center and NILC’s Immigrant Justice Fund. She is the recipient of both the Changing the Face of Philanthropy Award from the Women’s Funding Network and the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century award from Women’s eNews.
Patricia J. Williams is one of the most provocative intellectuals in American law today, a pioneer of both the law and literature, and critical race theory movements in American legal theory. She currently holds a joint appointment at Northeastern University, previously served as the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and has held fellowships at Dartmouth, the University of California at Irvine, Harvard, and Stanford University.
Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights which was named one of the “feminist classics of the last 20 years” that “literally changed women’s lives” by Ms. magazine, and one of the 10 best non-fiction books of the decade by Amazon.com. The hundreds of essays, book reviews, articles, and monthly columns she has authored challenge our ideas about socio-legal constructs of race and gender and illustrate some of America’s most complex societal problems.
Professor Williams has received awards from the American Educational Studies Association and the National Organization for Women, among others. In 2019, she was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2000, Professor Williams was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. She has appeared on such radio and television shows as All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation and Today, as well as in a number of documentary films.
Professor Williams’ current research includes three books in progress: The Complete Mad Law Professor (a compilation of The Nation columns); The Talking Helix (focused on bioethics and genetics); and Gathering the Ghosts (a literary and historical text based on Professor Williams’ family archival materials). In addition, she is working on a documentary film that knits together a narratively linked series of video images about the deaths of unarmed citizens beginning with Trayvon Martin. Her work remains at the cutting edge of legal scholarship.
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an award-winning author, professor, and sociologist, whose work has earned national and international recognition for the urgency and depth of its incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race, and gender. Her most recent accolades include being named the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University for her “critical perspective and analysis of some of the greatest social challenges we face today.” She is a senior research professor with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow.
McMillan Cottom earned her doctorate from Emory University’s Laney Graduate School in sociology in 2015. Her dissertation research formed the foundation for her first book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy.
McMillan Cottom’s most recent book, THICK: And Other Essays, is a critically acclaimed Amazon best-seller that situates Black women’s intellectual tradition at its center. THICK won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction.
