News
Activists, scholars and low-income women from around the country will gather at the College this weekend to examine issues confronting women in poverty and to search for ways to improve their situation, as part of the Gender and Poverty Conference.
The conference, organized by History Professors Mary Kelley and Annelise Orleck and Women's Studies Visiting Instructor Jo Ann Woodsum, will present different perspectives on impoverished women by featuring a wide variety of speakers, panelists, workshops and readings.
"We wanted to have a conference that dealt with the most pressing issues of our time -- women and children in poverty and the increasing percentage of women in poverty," Orleck said.
"We tried to bring together academics, scholars, activists and people from a wide variety of backgrounds," she said.
Miranda Johnson '97, who was on the conference's planning committee in the winter and is now helping to coordinate student volunteers, said the conference will be "very action-oriented."
"It's a combination of scholars and activists, who are all pro-women, coming together to devise strategies to combat women in poverty," she said.
The conference will begin with a reception and keynote address this evening and will continue through Sunday afternoon.
Conference organizers said one goal of the conference is to eliminate the generally negative attitude toward poor women.
Orleck, who is researching the history of welfare rights organizations since World War II, said, "I have a lot of contact with low-income women and am very concerned with stereotyping."
"I wanted to participate in a conference to dispel most of those stereotypes and see what kinds of solutions we might find for the problems of women in poverty that are real solutions, not just ways of blaming and punishing them further," she said.
Recent discussions concerning welfare reform in Congress make the conference's topic relevant.
It "came together as a topic that interested us and other people, but it has turned out to be a topic that is very timely," Kelley said.
"The renewed rhetoric in Congress about reform of the welfare system [caused] concern on the part of the [conference] organizers about the anti-poor women rhetoric," Woodsum said.
Many people think "poor women are deserving of the status of being in poverty, because they have too many kids or they are lazy or uneducated," she said.
Each of the conference organizers had her own goal for the weekend.
Woodsum said many of her students in Women's Studies or Native American Studies have trouble relating to issues of poverty.
She said she was particularly interested in the conference's inclusion of "actual people on welfare who will talk about how they ended up in poverty, and bring some understanding to the students about poverty."
Kelley said her hope is that the conference will increase the general awareness of the College community on these topics.
"I hope that it will be valuable for everybody [that they will] ... increase their commitment to think about these issues and act on them," she said.
Johnson said she also wanted to see the conference affect people's lives and actions.
"I hope to have people work on proactive strategies after the conference to affect public policy in the future," Johnson said.
Orleck said she has similar goals and added that she hoped conference participants would educate each other as well.
The conference organizers said they were excited about the speakers, panelists and performers and cited Dolores Huerta, co-founder and first vice president of the United Farm Workers of America, as a particularly interesting guest.
Huerta "is a legend," Orleck said.
