CSWS Annual Review

Madge and Val Lorwin watch a tea ceremony being performed in their living room, circa 1981 (photo courtesy of George Sheridan)

Civil Rights, Civil Liberties

Made possible by the gift of Madge and Val Lorwin, the inaugural Lorwin Lectureship will focus on Women’s Rights in a Global World. But who were the Lorwins? A conversation with UO history professor George Sheridan.

Q: You taught in the same department as Val Lorwin. How well did you know Val and Madge Lorwin?

Val interviewed me. I am Val’s successor in his job. I went there in 1976. I moved into their place, I think it was 1978. And then I stayed there until I got married, which was in 1986. So I was there through all that time.

Philosophy graduate student Megan Burke talks about women’s roles in agriculture to a class of first graders at the 4J French Immersion school in south Eugene (photo by Alice Evans).

On the Road in Eugene

CSWS played an active community role in celebrating Women’s History Month in March by sending UO graduate students and professors into the Eugene School District 4J classrooms. The scholars spoke to the 2010 theme of the National Women’s History Project, “Writing Women Back Into History.” A team of CSWS scholars selected the graduate student presenters from a pool of applicants.

Maggie Evans

Strategies of Silence in American Women’s Poetry

by Maggie Evans, PhD candidate, Department of English

The final lines of Marge Piercy’s “The Woman in the Ordinary” exemplify a familiar strain of contemporary American women’s poetry:

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,

a yam of a woman of butter and brass,

compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,

like a handgrenade set to explode,

like goldenrod ready to bloom. 

Irene Moyo, pictured here with her children, received a loan for her street vending business from research collaborating organization Zimbabwe Women with Disabilities in Development (ZWIDE).

HIV/AIDS and Women with Disabilities in Zimbabwe

by Susie Grimes, Graduate Student, Department of International Studies

In 2002 I was in Lusaka, Zambia, making a video documentary on a microcredit program for women with disabilities. We were at the marketplace to meet members of a sewing group that had received a small loan from the program. One of its members came forward and told us some startling news: out of the original twelve women with disabilities who had formed the collective a year earlier, only four were left. The others had died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

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