Videos

Dorothy Taylor on being a black woman in the 1960s
Gender issues: 2002
Dorothy Taylor, professor of criminology, responds to Sharyn Ladner's lecture by remarking that, in the 1960s, she could not obtain contraception without her husband's permission. Taylor discusses being black and female in the 1960s. She witnessed the 1967 Riot in Detroit, which came about, partly, because of complaints that the police were not doing their job of cleaning up prostitution and ensuing rumors that a prostitute had been shot and killed by an undercover vice squad cop. The riot occurred in a black neighborhood where C. L. Franklin (father of Aretha Franklin) was the minister of a Baptist church.
Time: 5 min
Lindsey Tucker on women's social conditions
Gender issues: 2002
Lindsey S. Tucker, Professor of English, recalls being a working girl in New York, where as as an editor at a publishing firm, women were paid much less than men. She wanted to teach women's studies, but such did not exist in the 1960s. Tucker describes how sociologists began to study women as a group, trying to move beyond the simple formulation of "women as victims." She also recalls how black women authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison brought new issues to the table, so that it became necessary to learn how to read women's literature in new ways.
Time: 15 min 15 sec
Phyllis Franklin on the inception of Women's Studies programs and discrimination against women
Gender issues: 2002
Phyllis Franklin, professor emeritus of English, speaks on the inception of women's studies programs. She recalls how, during the 1960s and 1970s, people talked about "living authentically," which meant expressing individuality through clothing, for example. She tells three anecdotes about discrimination and women's rights. The first is about reading The Second Sex and other books by Simone de Beauvoir. As a result, she pursued a Ph.D. and became a feminist. The second is about attending the MLA convention in 1970, at which a woman trying to give a report on sex discrimination was shouted down by the men in the audience. Franklin and others decided that day to establish a Women's Caucus for the MLA and to develop women's studies courses. The third anecdote involves the University of Miami women’s tennis team, who in the 1970s were thrown off a tennis court in the middle of a match because some male students wanted to play. The women students came to Franklin in humiliation and outrage, and Franklin telephoned the sports editor at the Miami Herald, who wrote a story on the incident and embarrassed the University so that such discrimination would not happen again.
Time: 21 min 17 sec
Rita Deutsch on feminism and suffrage
Gender issues: 2002
Rita Deutsch, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, speaks about feminism in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the 1960s. She describes famous feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Patricia Ireland and the many issues including suffrage (the right to vote) and other rights, such as equal pay for equal work, fair work conditions, and rights for working mothers. Deutsch describes two branches of feminism - one which was more conservative and sought equality for women, and the women's liberation movement, which was more radical.
Time: 10 min 41 sec
Sharyn Ladner on radical feminism and abortion rights
Gender issues: 2002
Sharyn Ladner, Assistant University Librarian, introduces herself as a graduate of Gettysburg College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, in 1967, during which time she had not been aware of the differences in treatment between male and female students (men could stay out all night, but women had curfews). She says, "Rather than questioning why the rules were different for women than for men, we just broke the rules." She speaks about radical feminism and abortion rights. Living in Bloomington with her husband, Ladner joined a consciousness-raising group of feminists. Very few states had legalized abortion, and most of them had harsh restrictions; in Indiana, it was illegal even to discuss contraception and abortion with unmarried women. Ladner became an abortion counselor, because in the late 1960s, five thousand women died every year because of "back-alley, illegal abortions." Her group networked with Planned Parenthood and Concerned Clergy and arranged help for women, until at last the Supreme Court ruled on Roe Vs. Wade to legalize abortion.
Time: min
Victoria Noriega on being a woman
Gender issues: 2002
Victoria Noriega, lecturer in Psychology, delivers a humorous talk on being a woman. She compares her own life opportunities with those of her grandmother, who was an immigrant from Sicily and who married a man not of her own choosing; and of her mother, who deduced from watching movies of the 1940s and 1950s that the way to get ahead in life was to marry a rich man. "So she married my father, who made $25 a week and had a car." Noriega describes how her mother made sacrifices so that she could learn to be a wife and mother herself one day; and how she was married for 12 years; and how when she got divorced, she became a single parent with no education and no credit cards. She was able to go back to school, however, because of the social changes that feminists had achieved.
Time: 12 min 16 sec





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