April 19, 1993

African-American author, social activist and feminist bell hooks, professor of Women’s Studies at Oberlin College, lectured on “Race, Gender, and Representation” as a part of Women’s Week. Molly Salkein ’94 found the lecture to be “amazing, bizarre and fantastic. [hooks] placed the burden of education and coalition on everyone.” hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black was published in 1989, and Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics appeared in 1990.

Women’s Week events also included a concert by singer, songwriter, guitarist, and feminist icon Ani DiFranco, and a lecture by El Salvadoran educators and activists Regina de los Angeles, Garay Gómez and Dora Alicia Lainez Escamilla, who spoke on “Women in War, Women in Peace.” A devastating civil war in El Salvador of 12 years’ duration, in which the United States had been clandestinely involved and in which some 75,000 Salvadorans had died, ended in January 1992.