RECAP: 2010 Seneca Falls Dialogues
Call & Response: Crossing Feminist Borders
Examine. Engage. Exchange.
The second Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues (SFD), “Call and Response: Crossing Feminist Borders,” was held October 8-10, 2010, at the newly restored Clarence Hotel in Seneca Falls, New York. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, PhD, distinguished author, activist, professor at Spellman College, and then-president of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), was keynote speaker and the inaugural recipient of the SFD Women’s Institute for Leadership and Learning Award (WILLA).
The SFD, for its second year, served as a forum for diverse faculty, students, community members, and activists to engage with one another across time, circumstance, and location. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said of women’s movements, “This is winter wheat we’re sowing, and other hands will harvest,” conveying a sense of how movements for change call out for wave upon wave of response. The history of women’s movements illustrates centuries-old patterns of call and response. The second Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues called participants to respond: to turn a critical eye and speak to, listen to, and dialogue with others on local and global gender issues.