Lectures For Lifelong Learners!

It is hard now to imagine a time when women were largely forbidden — by the usual practices, common sense, law and tradition — from exercising the right to vote, but gaining that vote was a difficult process. The suffrage movement was one of the longest, most radical, dramatic and ultimately successful political movements in US history. It was extremely dramatic, marked by suffragists’ seemingly “Impossible” demands, internal fighting, major splits, the first March on Washington, civil disobedience, imprisonment of activists and forced feedings, strong personalities, astute political strategizing and ultimately, victory.

There has been an active movement for women’s rights since the beginning of the 19th century, beginning with Black women demanding the right to preach, to be free of enslavement, and to vote. That movement continued through the larger suffrage movement and into the Women’s Liberation movement from the 1960s and still ongoing as evidenced in the #MeToo movement. This illustrated lecture discusses some of the key personalities, the issues fiercely debated and fought for, victories, setbacks, and the promise of future activism.

Presidential campaigns are always accompanied by commercial paraphernalia and novelties – dolls, t-shirts, banners, stickers and so on. This illustrated talk showcases and offers interpretations of many of those generated from the 2008 to 2020 elections – many of them bombastic, persuasive, funny, and often deliberately outrageous if not disturbing.

The invention of the birth control pill in the early 1960s heralded a new era of sexual openness after the restrictive 1950s. Women claimed sexual autonomy, Hollywood dropped its censorious Code, and abortion was legalized in 1973. But that’s not all: LGBTQ liberation was launched with the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969, swingers came to the suburbs, sexual guides and discussions proliferated, and pornography became more mainstream. By 2023, some of these earmarks of sexual and gender liberation are being rolled back or challenged, while the Internet continues to influence and alter how people meet and relate, including sexually. The illustrated talk traces the events of the ongoing sexual revolution as well as resistance to it.

The Wizard of Oz, Wicked, and Shrek are all beloved by both children and adults, have been produced as books and plays and inspired seemingly endless sequels. Their popularity is partially due to ways they operate at multiple levels. The children’s stake centers around archetypal themes of initiation, confrontation, heroism, transformation, romance and resolution. Grown-up viewers can find satisfaction in these timeless themes, while also recognizing more mature and timely ones: resistance to authoritarianism, dangers to women and girls, including from men who say they love them, the power of the green (nature), sexual freedom and gender diversity, Goddess myth, and an endorsement of the utopian possibilities so characteristic of the fairy tale.

Many stories, including those featuring fairy tale characters, are very popular because they operate at multiple levels. The beloved film series featuring the green ogre, Shrek (a Yiddish word meaning fear or terror), began as a children’s book by William Steig, who was the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. While working beautifully as a kind of fractured fairy tale that kids love, the background adult story is based in anti-fascist, feminist, and ecological themes. Farquaad is committing ethnic cleansing of the fairy-tale people and controlling his environment, while Shrek and Fiona signify the greenness of nature, happiness in the body, the refusal of conformist beauty standards, and wildness and beauty of that creative power of Mother Nature that cannot be owned or dominated.

The Wizard of Oz, the classic 1939 film, was based in an early 20th century book series by L. Frank Baum. It tells a classic initiatory story featuring a girl who travels to another world “over the rainbow,” good and wicked witches, dandy lions, and a fraudulent wizard. But it’s not just about a girl coming of age: A grown-up take finds that the tale is one of powerful women, gay friends, and the power of green nature. Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked (1990), now a blockbuster film, makes these themes more explicit, as the green Witch is now the hero, Glinda her ally, the wizard an authoritarian bully, and leading readers and viewers led to complex moral questioning of those who claim to represent “the good.”

Disney’s beloved The Little Mermaid is based on 1937 by Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson. The original story has a tragic ending, but in the animated 1990 version the princess Ariel completes her transformation, gets her wish, and marries her prince. Grown-up takes on The Little Mermaid consider the mythic meanings of the mermaid figure, with Ariel an avatar of Aphrodite, Goddess of sex and love and the story of Ariel’s initiation into adulthood, aided by the elder Ursula (a character based on the real-life drag queen Divine). Beauty and the Beast, based on a French fairy tale, tells a story of a young woman whose father gives her to the Beast, who used to be a prince. The message is that if she loves him enough he will turn back into the prince, but here and elsewhere, the story serves as a justification and apology for domestic violence.

Moana tells a (made-up) Polynesian creation myth about a culture hero who “steals the heart” of green Mother Earth, causing the emergence of a red and fiery lava monster who threatens the world with ecological collapse. Moana is the 8-year old heroine, who journeys to restore balance to nature and heal this primal wound. Grown-up takes onMoana discern themes of the dangers of climate change – the world on fire, and the fatal folly of trying to fool Mother Nature. We also consider the actual creation stories of Polynesia and why some Polynesian people criticize Disney for distorting their heritage.

When we look to mythology along with popular culture to find narratives of female power we often only find evil witches, dread monsters, lovestruck girls, and subordinated helpmeets. Yet these are often patriarchal distortions of originally powerful Goddesses.  In this illustrated talk, Jane Caputi, PhD, and author of Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture, reverses the reversals of patriarchal myth and unearths the Goddess and female-power origins of the witch, the mermaid, Medusa and Eve.

In the early 1970s, green activists invoked Mother Earth, with demands to “Stop the Rape of the Earth,” and advice to “Love Your Mother.” This understanding of Earth as Mother is ancient and worldwide, but modern cultures tend to dismiss this naming as unscientific, childish, fluffy or “primitive.” But, Earth as Mother is both an ancient and contemporary scientific and a spiritual understanding. It also is political as a global Indigenous movement agitates for the Rights of Mother Earth and some rivers and mountains have legally been recognized as having rights in New Zealand and other nations. When we know and call Earth Mother this helps us to understand the connections between a culture’s domination, abuse and exploitation of the Earth and violence against women and calls for an alternative green consciousness and way of life.