“Women’s History Month is a celebration of women’s leadership and the untold stories of women,” said Natalie Turrin, director of the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center (SWAG). Turrin noted that while Bowdoin’s two-week spring vacation splits up the month, plenty of events happened on campus before and after the break.
The schedule of activities will conclude this Saturday with an event organized by the student-run Women of Color Coalition. The group is hosting a talk in Ladd House at 3:00 p.m. with two alumnae—Adrienne Hatton ’90 and Minal Bopaiah ’99—both “pioneering wonderful contributions to their industries,” according to students.
Hatton is the senior engagement director for Compass Consulting Services, LLC, in Ohio, with more than thirty years of experience in social services, education, and government. Bopaiah founded Brevity & Wit, a strategy and design firm, and is the author of Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives, which won the 2022 Terry McAdam Book Award for the book most likely to change the way nonprofit professionals work.
“Women’s History Month is a celebration of women’s leadership and the untold stories of women.” — Natalie Turrin, director of SWAG.
On Thursday, March 29, Paula Cueller Cueller, a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, is screening a documentary by feminist and social anthropologist Amanda Libertad Castro. The film, Mujeres Altar, chronicles the lives of three El Salvadoran women. Following the screening in Kresge Auditorium, Castro will lead a Q&A.
Rolling back the clock to the weeks before spring break, the Feminist Collective celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8 with giveaways in Smith Union. The Feminist Collective is a pilot program launched this year to bring students together who want to “explore living a feminist life and strategies for feminist organizing, and discuss how to sustain ourselves and the feminist movement,” Turrin said. The group, which is supported by SWAG and the Office of Gender Violence Prevention and Health Education, meets weekly and is open to all students.
Local artist Parivash Rohani hosted an art exhibit in Lamarche Gallery called #OurStoryIsOne, part of a global art movement to commemorate Baha’i women killed for their religious identity.
The Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies department organized a panel of alumni on March 4 to speak about “the wonderful careers they’ve had with the GSWS degree,” Turrin said. The four panelists work in a range of industries: Fumio Sugahara ’96 is dean of admissions and financial aid at Hampshire College; Mara Gandal-Powers ’04 is director of birth control access and senior counsel for the National Women’s Law Center; Anna Ackerman ’12 is manager of the Entrepreneurship Program for The Roux Institute of Northeastern University; and Molly Soloff ’15 is senior director of marketing for the marketing agency FARRYNHEIGHT.
In early March, the Japanese Student Association organized a celebration for Hinamatsuri, or Girl's Day, and taught participants how to make tsumami-zaiku, which is the "the art of making hair accessories with fabric," according to organizers.
From February 28 to March 2, the Department of Theater and Dance put on a sold-out production, Valor, Outrage and Woman, a comedic play written by Spanish Golden Age playwright Ana Caro de Mallén and directed by Sylvia Cervantes Blush. It featured a performance by the musical ensemble La Chimera. Other sponsors included the Departments of Music, American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies, and Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Alice Cooper Morse Fund for the Performing Arts.
On February 29, the Bowdoin College Holocaust Education Lecture Series invited Judy Batalion, author of the The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, to give a talk on campus. Her lecture was sponsored by the Gabry Family Fund.
While conducting research at the British Library, Batalion came across the 1946 Yiddish book Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos), filled with accounts of young Jewish women who defied the Nazis. These Polish-Jewish “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, and flirted with and shot Nazis. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails, bombed German supply trains, organized soup kitchens, and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. In her lecture, Batalion shared some of these stories, as well as discussed why so much of this history remained hidden for so long, according to the event post.
An event that created a lot of buzz took place February 27, when several offices—the Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life, SWAG, Gender Violence Prevention and Health Education, the Religion department, and Middle Eastern and North African Student Association—collaborated to invite local artist Parivash Rohani, who hosted an art exhibit in Lamarche Gallery called #OurStoryIsOne.
“Parivash was a wonderful community member to work, and she brought a story to campus that few were familiar with,” Turrin said.
#OurStoryIsOne is a global art movement that commemorates Baha’i women killed for their religious identity. “This is also a personal story for Maine resident, activist, and artist Parivash Rohani. This exhibition seeks to highlight how local women’s stories can become global symbols of standing up for justice and equality,” the event organizers said.
Finally, the month began with RISE, a production featuring Bowdoin women who perform stories submitted anonymously from women in the community. Organized by the student group fEMPOWER, RISE is a perennially popular event that is student-led and women-led, Turrin said. “They had a successful set of shows, and they do amazing work to share the untold stories of Bowdoin women,” she added.
