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.”

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.