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Outstanding Speakers coming to
MC for Women’s History Month
Release Date: March 12, 2002
A lecture by author and social activist Kathleen A. O’Shea
will kick off a series of three public presentations celebrating Women’s History Month at
Monmouth College.
O’Shea will speak March 17 at 2 p.m. in Wells Theater.
Author and historian Stacey Robertson of Bradley University will speak March 19 at 7
p.m. in the Highlander Room in the Stockdale Center and prominent theologian and feminist
Mary Daly will appear in April. All lectures are free and open to the public.
The chaplain’s office is sponsoring O’Shea’s March 15-19 visit.
A nun for 25 years, Sr. O’Shea is a social worker who researches female offenders,
particularly women on death row. She says she didn’t set out looking for connections with
women on death row, but instead simply wanted information about them – who they are and the
ways in which they live from day to day.
“I was writing a sociological reference book,” she said, “a
fairly safe, fairly emotionless endeavor.” As she got to know the incarcerated women she was
studying, however, what became clear to her were not their differences, but how, in so many
ways, she and the women in prison were the same. Her public talk is entitled “Women on the
Row.”
During her stay at Monmouth, O’Shea will be housed on campus in
order to be more available to talk with students about her experiences as an advocate for
women on death row as well as the eight years she spent in Chile. She is also scheduled to
speak with several classes.
Overlapping her visit will be Robertson’s talk on campus.
An associate professor of history at Bradley and director of the university’s women’s studies
program, she is author of the book “Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist.”
Robertson’s talk is titled “Fighting for Freedom: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest,”
and her visit is sponsored by Monmouth’s departments of history and women’s studies.
“I became interested in abolition over 15 years ago while doing
research on Parker Pillsbury,” said Robertson. “His intense life-long commitment to the
movement drew me in, and my interest has never faltered.
“My interest in Midwestern women grew out of my work on Parker,”
she continued, “and from Peoria to Monmouth, there was a very active group of abolitionists,
many of them women. Mary B. Davis, for example, helped found the Peoria Female Anti-Slavery
Society and the Illinois State Female Anti-Slavery Society. Women abolitionists were often
exposed to violence, yet they reacted with courage and steadfastness.”
More information on Daly’s public lecture will be available closer to her April 17
visit.
Released
by the Office of College Communications
Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications
Phone: 309-457-2117
Fax: 309-457-2330
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