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 free of charge and takes place
Sunday, November 18, 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut
Street
in Live Oak Park. http://www.berkeleyartcenter.org

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.