Agents of Change

This Friday, March 30th, the 2007 Women's Leadership Conference (gwired.gwu.edu/wlc) will take place on the Mount Vernon Campus. The conference celebrates women who have taken leadership roles. We thought that was a pretty good thing to celebrate, so we put up a book display highlighting a few of the women leaders throughout history who have inspired us.

Here are just a few of the books you might find interesting:

African American Women in Congress: Forming and Transforming History
by Laverne McCain Gill

Shirley Chisholm rocks my world. In 1968 she became the first African American woman elected to Congress. Four years later she became the first African American woman to run for president, running with the slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought." This book chronicles her life and and the lives of 14 other trailblazing women who have served in the House and Senate.


We Were Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising
by Stree Shakti Sanghatana
From the back: The Telangana struggle (1948-51) against the feudal overlords in the princely state of Hyderabad, and later against the Indian army itself, is now legendary. These interviews tell of women who left behind a life of the household to learn a life of activism: hiding from the police, fighting and facing the death of comrades. The excitement of working in a resistance movement is clear, but also the bitterness of being told to go back to the kitchen once the struggle ended.





Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature
by Linda Lear
From the back: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did more than any single publication or event to alert the world to the hazards of environmental poisoning. Linda Lear gives a compelling portrait of this heroic woman, illuminating the origin of her connection with nature and of her determination to save what she loved.