Events and Programs

Thanks to the generosity of the Dionne and Guerin families, the women’s studies program every year sponsors the Danielle Dionne Guerin Memorial Lecture in Women’s Studies.  The Lecture features a nationally known speaker addressing some aspect of women’s experiences or situations.  The lecture is usually held in March, and is free and open to the public.

Our Dionne Guerin Lecturers have been:

2006

2005   Stephanie Coontz  “Marriage: Past, Present, and Future”
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is the Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001-04.  She is the author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (2000), The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families, (1997), and The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families.  She is also editor of American Families: A Multicultural Reader (1999).  Her Dionne Guerin Lecture was based on her latest book, Marriage, a History, which was selected as one of the best books of 2005 by the Washington Post. 

2004   Sally Helgesen   “Women’s Leadership in the New Economy”
Sally Helgesen is a leading business and leadership development consultant who has worked with clients around the globe, helping them to understand the major trends that are transforming organizations and figuring out what kind of opportunities those trends present for leaders.  She is the author of The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations (2005), Thriving in 24/7: Six Strategies for Taming the New World of Work (2001), Everyday Revolutionaries: Working Women and the Transformation of American Life (1998), and The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership (1995).  Her Dionne Guerin Lecture addressed the advantages of leadership styles more typical of women for organizations operating in the 24/7 economy.  

2003  Anne Crittenden  “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is still the Least Valued”
Anne Crittenden’s Dionne Guerin Lecture was based on The Price of Motherhood, her widely acclaimed bestseller which was listed by the Chicago Tribune as one of the Top Ten feminist literary works since Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique of 1964.  She argued that although women have been liberated, mothers have not.  Drawing on hundreds of interviews, and the latest research in economics, family law, sociology, history, and child development, she discussed how mothers are uniquely disadvantaged economically.  Women choose to be mothers, but they do not choose the adverse consequences of that decision.  Mothers didn’t write the rules that govern how their work is treated - and rendered invisible - by employers, by the law, or by government.  Crittenden concluded with some suggestions on how those rules can be changed.


2002  Joan Jacobs Brumberg  “From Corsets to Body Piercing: How History and Culture Shape the Experiences of American Girls”
Joan Jabobs Brumberg is a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor at Cornell University where she teaches history, human development and gender studies.  She is author of Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988) which won the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Berkshire Book Prize, the Eileen Basker Prize, and the Watson Davis Prize.  Her lecture, which inaugurated the Dionne Guerin Lecture, was based on her widely acclaimed book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1998) which was selected by the American Library Association for a Choice Award and also for special notice by Voice of Youth Advocacy.  She explained how growing up as a girl has changed over the past one hundred years and why the pressures on girls are now so intense.  Popular culture has become more powerful and expectations about physical perfection have increased, so that American girls have come to define themselves more and more through their bodies.  Brumberg argued for greater advocacy on behalf of girls to relieve these intense pressures and allow them to value themselves for their potential, their abilities, and the quality of their characters, rather than their appearance.