RIGHTS REVOLUTIONS
Participant Backgrounds
Martha Ackelsberg taught political science at Smith College for over 40 years, offering courses on urban politics, feminist and democratic theory, wealth and poverty, and social movements. She has published two books as well as numerous articles on anarchism, feminism, social movements, the “gay marriage debates,” reconstructing families, and Jewish women. During her time at Smith, she helped to establish, and teach in, the Women’s Studies Program (later Program for the Study of Women and Gender). In addition to teaching and research, she has held a variety of offices in the American Political Science Association and its committees and caucuses; served on (and chaired) the Northampton Housing Partnership; was active in the early years of the women’s health movement in New York City; and has been deeply involved in Jewish feminism since the 1970s.
Barbara Brown became involved in the women’s movement while at Yale Law School where, with Ann Freedman and others, she co-authored “The Equal Rights Amendment: A Constitutional Basis for Equal Rights for Women”, published in the Yale Law Journal. She co-founded the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia. She has been a partner at Paul Hastings, a large private law firm, for the past 30-plus years, representing employers in the broad range of employment law and litigation. She is fascinated by the confluence of social, cultural, and legal influences that drive personal decisions about work and the use of statistics to uncover patterns in large groups of decisions. Brown has written several books, chaired the Labor and Employment Law Section of the American Bar Association, and served on several non-profit boards.
Tom Dublin has been a professor of history for 40 years at the University of California, San Diego and the State University of New York at Binghamton. He taught U.S. Women’s History for twelve years in San Diego and U.S. immigration and labor history at Binghamton. His publications have explored women’s work in the U.S. in the nineteenth century and the decline of anthracite coal mining in the twentieth. For two decades he has served as co-editor of the three WOMEN AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS websites, online databases available at academic libraries. As participant and observer he has experienced the dramatic changes that have occurred in women’s employment in higher education and the emergence of Women’s and Gender Studies in the curriculum.
Can economic policies and legal rights reinforce each other to create and sustain social justice? Willene Jones Johnson first struggled with these questions during the political and social movements of her college years, and continued to consider them while working with other economists to contain the economic and financial upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s. But her experiences on the Board of the African Development Bank, when much of West Africa was being destroyed by conflict, compelled her to develop a new analytical framework—one that reshapes economic policies and institutional practices. This economics of peacebuilding aims to increase income and welfare, but to do so by building more resilient societies that promote inclusion and sustain peace. Although much of her work still focuses on the international (training peacekeepers and teaching strategies for post-conflict reconstruction), Willene now devotes considerable energy to applying the principles of peacebuilding at home in rural SouthSide Virginia.