Tag Archives: women

Thanks to Mary Walton for her lecture on Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06

We would like to thank author Mary Walton for her lecture this afternoon on the courageous work of Swarthmore alums Alice Paul ’05 and Mabel Vernon ’06 in their organizing and nonviolent campaigns to secure the vote for women in the United States.

A standing-room only crowd of people from the Swarthmore community and the local community gathered in the Scheuer Room to celebrate the International Day of Peace, the College’s sesquicentennial, and 125 years since the first peace studies course in higher education was taught at Swarthmore. The audience expressed their appreciation for Ms. Walton’s presentation with extended applause.

We would like to thank all of our co-sponsors who made this event a success, including Peace Day Philly for including our event in the city-wide celebration of the International Day of Peace.

Sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, the President’s Office, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Resource Center, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature Department, and Political Science Department.

Mark your calendars: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mark your calendars for the College’s first sesquicentennial celebration event, a talk by author Mary Walton:

A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul ’05, Mabel Vernon ’06, and the Battle for the Ballot

Mary Walton

September 19, 2013; 4:15 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Maps and directions

Download a flyer

Mary Walton

On September 19th, Peace and Conflict Studies and co-sponsors will celebrate the International Day of Peace, 125 years of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore College, and the start of the College’s Sesquicentennial with a talk by Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot. The focus of Walton’s talk will be Alice Paul (Class of 1905) and her friend and fellow Swarthmore alum, Mabel Vernon (Class of 1906).

A New Jersey Quaker, Alice Paul was the leader of the militant wing of the suffrage movement from 1913 to 1920. Hers was a David-and-Goliath struggle to convince a reluctant congress and a stubborn president to give women the vote. Paul and her followers were the first people to picket the White House. They were arrested, thrown in jail, brutalized and force fed when they went on hunger strikes. A pioneer in non-violent resistance, she was to suffrage what Gandhi was to Indian independence, what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights.

In 1913, Mabel Vernon gladly gave up teaching to join her college friend, Alice Paul, in working full time for the Congressional Union. From that day on, she devoted her life to suffrage and other causes. Mabel Vernon was among the most militant suffragists. In 1916, she stood up in a full auditorium and heckled President Wilson as he spoke about democracy. Vernon picketed the White House and was among the first suffragists to go to jail.

Mary Walton is the author of four previous works of nonfiction. She was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years where she wrote more than a hundred magazine stories as a staff writer for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times, Washingtonian, theWashington Monthly, and the American Journalism Review. After graduation from Harvard University, and a turn at social work and community organizing, Walton began her journalism career in 1969 as a reporter for the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

International Day of Peace 2013

Bibliographic links for photographs.

Wendy Chmielewski awarded fellowship at Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History

We are happy to announce that Dr. Wendy Chmielewski, Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and a member of the Peace and Conflict Studies steering committee, has been awarded a fellowship from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History to conduct further research in support of the project: “Her Hat Was in the Ring: U.S. Women Elected to Political Office Before 1920“. Visit the project’s website.

The project website states:

This web site identifies women candidates for elective office in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, giving biographical information for each woman, information about her campaign, party affiliation, photographs, and lists of selected resources. We estimate that women ran in well over 3,500 campaigns by 1920. Currently, our database contains biographical records for 2,579 women, who ran in 3,633campaigns.

Again, congratulations!

Women in War Zones: Sexual Violence in the Congo

Women in War Zones: Sexual Violence in the Congo

Thursday, November 10, 2011

7:00 p.m.

Scheuer Room at Swarthmore College

(maps and directions)

: photo by Julien Harneis (CC license via flickr)

Women in War Zones International is a group of women dedicated to telling personal stories of women in areas of conflict around the world promoting human rights and health, working to prevent war crimes, and helping prevent abuse to women who live in war zones. The actual stories of women will be vividly told through photography and a documentary film screening.

The group seeks to fight injustice against women by education and uniting the audience. Their goal is to empower women by creating programs that promote peace, stability, and opportunities for women.

Sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Africa Consortium.

Nicholas Kristof to speak at Swarthmore on November 14

From our friends at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility:

“A Call to Action: Encouraging People to join the World’s Fight.”

Nicholas Kristof

Monday, November 14, 2011

7:30 p.m.

Lang Performing Arts Center

Swarthmore College

(maps and directions)

A Harvard graduate and former Rhodes Scholar, Kristof is a Pulitzer-prize winning author and one of the New York Times‘ most popular columnists.

Drawing from his experiences as a foreign affairs reporter that have taken him to six continents and 140 countries, Kristof will talk about covering such historic events as the protests in Egypt that led to Hasni Mubarak’s resignation, the genocide in Darfur, the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.

His talk will also by informed by his most recent best-seller, written with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women World-wide. There they make a brilliantly-argued case that support for global women’s rights should be the human rights movement of our era, and that it will be where we find the solutions to the world’s poverty.

Sponsored by the Cooper Foundation and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

Contact: langcenter@swarthmore.edu (610) 690-5742

Lucretia Mott Symposium – November 4

Lucretia Mott Symposium, Swarthmore College

Friday, November 4, 2011, 2:00 – 5:30

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Free and Open to the Public (maps and directions)

Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), Quaker minister, abolitionist and feminist, a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and the “guiding spirit” behind the First Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, spent sixty years of her long life working for reform. This symposium marks the publication of historian Carol Faulkner’s new book, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Woman’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America. The symposium also commemorates the contributions of Margaret Hope Bacon (1921-2011), author of Lucretia Mott: Valiant Friend and numerous books on Quakers and reform.

2:00 – 3:30 Lucretia Mott, Margaret Hope Bacon and the Rediscovery of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement and Radical Reform.

Presenters: Beverly Wilson Palmer, Nancy Hewitt, Judith Wellman and Christopher Densmore.

4:00 – 5:30 Lucretia Mott: Truth for Authority, Not Authority for Truth

Presenters: Carol Faulkner, Ellen M. Ross and Bruce Dorsey.

Questions? contact cdensmo1@swarthmore.edu

Women and peacebuilding prioritized in Nobel Peace Prize selection

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Tawakkul Karman (Yemen); President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia); and Leymah Gbowee (Liberia). Leymah Gbowee spoke here in Philadelphia at Villanova University, and several Swarthmore Peace and Conflict Studies students went to hear her speak with Prof. George Lakey. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee praised the women “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Women, War, and Peace series premieres October 11

Watch the full episode. See more Women War and Peace.

[Check your local listings]

[from pbs.org]

Women, War & Peace is a bold new five-part PBS television series challenging the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain. The vast majority of today’s conflicts are not fought by nation states and their armies, but rather by informal entities: gangs and warlords using small arms and improvised weapons. The series reveals how the post-Cold War proliferation of small arms has changed the landscape of war, with women becoming primary targets and suffering unprecedented casualties. Yet they are simultaneously emerging as necessary partners in brokering lasting peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict. With depth and complexity, Women, War & Peace spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan and Colombia to Liberia, placing women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security, and reframing our understanding of modern warfare.

Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, Women, War & Peace is the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the roles of women in war and peace. The series will present its groundbreaking message across the globe by utilizing all forms of media, including U.S. and international primetime television, radio, print, web, and worldwide community screenings, and will be accompanied by an educational and outreach initiative designed to advance international accountability in regard to women and security. Women, War & Peace is a co-production of THIRTEEN and Fork Films.

Women, War & Peace will premiere on your local PBS station Tuesday nights from Oct. 11 to Nov. 8, 2011. Check your local listings for air times, and click here to watch the trailer.

The five episodes in the series:

I Came to Testify is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their remarkable courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the astonishing story of the Liberian women who took on the warlords and regime of dictator Charles Taylor in the midst of a brutal civil war, and won a once unimaginable peace for their shattered country in 2003.

When the U.S. troop surge was announced in late 2009, women in Afghanistan knew that the ground was being laid for peace talks with the Taliban. Peace Unveiled follows three women in Afghanistan who are risking their lives to make sure that women’s rights don’t get traded away in the deal.

The War We Are Living travels to Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, where two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are braving a violent struggle over their gold-rich lands. They are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.

War Redefined, the capstone of Women, War & Peace, challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain through incisive interviews with leading thinkers, Secretaries of State and seasoned survivors of war and peace-making. Interviewees include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee; Bosnian war crimes investigator Fadila Memisevic; and globalization expert Moisés Naím.