With a thoughtful expression on her face, Associate Professor of History Sucheta Mazumdar recalls that this is the third year that Women's History Month was celebrated with a week-long series of events at Duke University.
At schools she previously either attended or taught at, she had participated in the celebration of International Women's Day March 8. When Mazumdar arrived at Duke, however, she noticed the absence of such an observance.
"I started celebrating that for a couple of years [at Duke]," she said. "My class participated. We would do readings with the librarian and women's history archives. And that grew to a week-long celebration of Women's History Month."
"Women, War and Violence" was the theme for this year's program, which kicked off March 24 with a reading from Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the commemoration of women in history. About 30 years ago at a seminar for women leaders, Professor of History Claudia Koonz said, Lerner and other participants in the conference unanimously announced their commitment toward achieving a national and federal level of recognition for women's history.
"Just a bunch of women sitting around a table," Koonz chuckled.
In her reading, Lerner related her experience of growing up as a teenage girl in Vienna under the rise of fascism in the 1930s. She would find refuge in America at the age of 18 and eventually rise to become a preeminent scholar and pioneer in the field of history, particularly reexamining the place of women in history.
While one may associate this year's theme of "Women, War and Violence" with current events in Iraq, Mazumdar dismissed any notions that the committee has been deliberate about their choice. "We planned this back in October," she explained.
Koonz did, however, decide to alter her topic in the March 28 panel entitled "Woman and Race Terror in Civil Wars," to include Rwanda and Iraq. It was originally set to discuss only women and violence in Bosnia.
The day before the panel, Francoise Verges, a professor from Goldsmiths College at the University of London, delivered a keynote address that partly inspired Koonz to change her subject. Verges' address explored the connections among slavery, colonialism and the phases of globalization.
"I talked about the way that experts and media tend to reduce human beings to abstractions," Koonz said. "I wanted to bring in the way that the Iraq situation compared with the way journalism is mobilized to fight in a way that frightens the humanity of the enemy."
Other highlights of the program included a film marathon that continuously ran for six hours in the Bryan Center, posing a flexible enter-and-exit policy. The marathon, titled "Women and War," resulted in a satisfying turnout.
"The idea was to expose the audience to the different dimensions of war - how women were both affected by it and complicit in war," Mazumdar said.
The program also presented students with the opportunity to view the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, a collection that is growing, Mazumdar said, "to be one of the most important archives in the country."
Marking the last day of the program was a roundtable conversation on the state of the field of women's history. Jocelyn Olcott, assistant professor of history and a panelist in the roundtable conversation, discussed feminist theory against the backdrop of Latin America and compared these theoretical views to those of European historians.
"We talked about what's defining the questions that women historians are asking," Olcott said. "It was an interesting comparative discussion."
In the end, organizers declared the program a success.
"The theme was more cohesive this year than [last]," Koonz offered. "Every year it gets better."
Olcott mentioned the opportunity to open dialogue among colleagues from different departments and universities. "It's a nice mix - bringing in speakers and fostering dialogue among the people here. Until you have an event like this, you don't have colleagues [involved in such discourse], particularly across different departments."
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