Reliving a Pivotal Decade in Women’s Liberation
BU Revolutionary Moment conference probes movement’s start
BU Today
By Susan Seligson
3-27-2014
Deborah Belle suspected that the time was right to take a scholarly look at the US women’s liberation movement from the 1960s to the 1970s and weigh the legacy of those times, but last year when she began organizing a BU conference on those pivotal years, the passionate response to the idea floored her.
“We touched a nerve,” says Belle, a College of Arts and Sciences psychology professor, who will be joined at the conference A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s today through Saturday, March 29, by hundreds of historians and other North American and European scholars who will consider, critique, and celebrate the period through panel discussions, films, poetry, music and a stage play. Among those presenting are writer Susan Faludi, novelist and poet Marge Piercy, and feminist historian and Dorothea Lange biographer Linda Gordon. Academy Award winning actress and gender equality advocate Geena Davis (CFA’79, Hon.’99) will also be on campus to accept an award through the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.