2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

We need more stories. Stories that aren’t in history books. Stories that have been told in hushed voices after supper. Stories that women tell each other at bus stops: about bad employers and Miss Anne’s crazy idea to clean the freezer with ammonia and vanilla. Stories from authentic voices: women prisoners creating their own holiday dinner from stockpiled commissary items to spite and to instill fear in the guards. Stories about the intimacy of struggle--about lovers who worked together, and daughters who took up their mothers’ work--that are not reduced to malicious gossip. Where are these stories? How can we share them, make them into lessons about organizing, about power, and about justice?

This roundtable of scholar-activists and activist-scholars will explore ways to imagine, discover, and share stories about migration as resistance and resistance as home. Callie House, the leader of the Ex-Slave Movement, may have never found her cause had she not left Murfreesboro for Nashville. Rosina Tucker, born in an alley house in Washington, DC, moved undetected from kitchen to kitchen to solidify black women’s support for trade unionism. Wilhelmina Perry, a black woman born in Harlem, found her organizing base and her life partner in the Nuyorican community with Dr. Antonia Pantoja, the founder of Aspira.

Stories like these are usually tucked away when they are recorded at all. What happens when they are made the center of history? They change more than just the angle of vision, Dr. Berry has said; they change history itself.