harvard talk
The Harvard Take Back the Night Committee–as personified by Mallory Hellman–asked me to speak on survivor activism and my book. The event happened last night and it was great.
We met in the Kirkland Junior Commons Room, a very Harvard venue with tall paneled walls, mullioned windows, wing backed chairs set in conversational clusters, and august portraits on the walls. A friend of my son Ben met me there early and helped with the set up chairs, screen and projector. (Thanks, Dev!)
There was so much to say about the survivor movement, its birth in feminism, its glory days of conferences and newsletters like The Healing Woman, the time of contraction in the mid-1990’s, and the amazing work that people are carrying out now in a spirit that is broader and more inclusive. What it takes to do this work. Its rewards.
I had to tell it through the lens of my own experience, and for the first time I put that together as a coherent narrative. When I did (although I didn’t present all of this) it was an amazing parade of people and events spanning, for me, okay a life time, but as an activist the past two decades.
Much of what I did talk about was making the socially invisible visible and what it is like to do that work.
Some amazing people came–passionate, articulate, inquisitive. There were excellent questions, many of them around offenders. Who are they? How can we raise people differently? What can we do to help people change? When do you treat and when do you lock up someone up and throw away the key. These are critical questions and we don’t yet have definative answers. I could point to the work of Stop It Now!, offender treatment programs, and some studies. But so much work is yet to be done.
It was a good evening, satisfying, full. There’s always more I wish I’d said, the question I could have listened to more deeply…
This morning dawned bright and sunny and so warm. Real spring, I’d almost forgotten about shirt sleeve weather. In Northwestern California we’ve had cold rain for way too long. But here in Boston the locust trees are in bloom, the tulip trees are pink flames against the red brick buildings and gray slate roofs. I went out and bought myself a tee shirt and wore a skirt, just to feel the soft air.
