Women Activists Then and Now

WOMEN ACTIVISTS THEN AND NOW Special Event in conjunction with: The Whole World's Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s An Exhibition of Documentary Photography at the Berkeley Art Center Women Activists Then and Now examines the legacy of three generations of women activists. The panel is open to the public free of charge and takes place Sunday, November 18, 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut Street in Live Oak Park. Moderated by historian Ruth Rosen, author of The World Split Open, the panelists include 60s activist, Susan Griffin, author of the Book of Courtesans: A Catalogue of their Virtues; Tillie Olsen, author of Tell Me a Riddle and Other Stories, whose activism goes back to the 1940s and 1950s Ida McCray, founder and executive director of Families With A Future, reuniting children with their incarcerated parents and a former political prisoner in the 1970s, and Miriam Joffe-Block, in her twenties and an activist in the anti-sweatshop movement, most recently working in Southeast Asia. An American Sign Language interpreter will be present at the event. Susan Griffin is the author of more than twenty books and has won dozens of awards for her work as a poet, feminist writer, essayist, playwright, and filmmaker. The first volume of an extended work, she calls a social autobiography, A Chorus of Stones, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award, and won the BABRA award in 1992. Woman and Nature, a classic work which inspired eco-feminism, was published in a new addition by Sierra Club Books in 2000. Named by Utne Reader as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium. She has been a recipient of an NEA grant, a new MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Co-operation, and an Emmy award for her play, Voices. She lectures widely in the United Stated and abroad, teaches a course in philosophy called Thinking Like Nature, at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as well as teaching privately in her home in Berkeley. Tillie Olsen is a novelist, short story writer, and feminist critic. She was born in 1912, in Nebraska, to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. Olsen, a radical and modernist, had a socialist upbringing. Olsen decided to become a writer while she was a fellow in StanfordÕs Creative Writing Program (1956-57). She published several widely admired pieces in periodicals during the 1930s. She achieved full national prominence with the publication of her first book in the 1060s, Tell Me A Riddle (1961), a collection of stories notable for its subtle registration of working class America. Olsen is also the author of Silences (1978), a benchmark of feminist criticism, and of the novel Yonnondio (1974). Ida McCray is the founder and executive director of Families With A Future, a nonprofit organization. She is a former political prisoner and has worked for the San Francisco Sheriffs Department for the past three years. There she reunites children with their incarcerated parents through parent training, literacy training, and increased visitation. Families With A Future is dedicated to maintaining the bond between incarcerated women and their children. Ida McCray was awarded a two-year fellowship (1999-2001) by California Wellness Foundation in association with Eureka Communities for her work in bringing the issues of children of incarcerated parents to the publics eye. She attends San Francisco State University and is pursuing her masters degree to become a Marriage, Family, Child Counselor. Miriam Joffe-Block graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in Cultural Anthropology. She has served as a teacher and mentor to ten children in the Congreso de Latinos Unidos Freedom School, and co-authored and co-ordinated a pilot project with the Worker Rights Consortium. She was an American Center for International Labour Society Policy Intern. She speaks Thai fluently, having studying in Thailand, and in 1998 she participated in the Council for International Educational Exchange. She ran an anti-sweatshop campaign, and was the Logistical Co-ordinator for the Summer 1999 USAS National Organization Conference. The concurrent exhibition of documentary photography, THE WHOLE WORLD'S WATCHING, runs free of charge through December 16. The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. The Berkeley Art Center will be closed for Thanksgiving on November 22-25. A 156 page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.