news

Film on Olympian Rower Teaches Gender Equity in Sports In an article in the New York Times "Backtalk" section on March 12, women's studies professor Martha Ackmann reported on the enthusiastic Emma Willard School screening of a documentary film made by Mary Mazzio '83. Mazzio, a former Olympic rower, now a Boston lawyer, filmed the story of Chris Ernst, a two-time Olympian, who, in 1976, led her rowing team in a protest against Yale's lack of athletic facilities for women. The protest involved stripping to the waist and exposing the words "Title IX" drawn across their backs and breasts. Educators "snapped to attention" in response to the protest and ensuing media attention, wrote Ackmann, who characterized the film as "creating healthy images for young girls," and teaching them about "gender equity in sports.

Stuy Town Remembered A book forthcoming this fall by MHC English professor and author Corinne Demas, Eleven Stories High: Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948-1968, was quoted from in an article in the March 8 New York Times profiling the fifty-two-year-old housing development in New York City. "Unlike the fast city public housing projects in ghetto neighborhoods, meccas of despair," writes Demas in her book, "Stuyvesant Town was a middle-class community where little girls took piano lessons and were expected to go to college."

Fetal Remains Writing in the Los Angeles Times March 13, anthropology professor Lynn M. Morgan criticized efforts by pro-life forces to manipulate the issue of fetal tissue sales for their own political advantage. She also argued that Senate Judiciary Committee hearings will merely "discredit abortion and fetal research by associating these practices with the grisly crime of selling body parts" when the more pressing point is that criminal penalties for violators of the law "should be strictly enforced."

On Your Marx MHC professor of economics Fred Moseley was cited in a January 16 New York Times article on how Marxist economists are interpreting the long-lasting economic boom in the U.S.

Slim Pickings in the Big Apple Three years ago she graduated from MHC. Last month, Maya Perkins '97 was quoted in the New York Times (February 6) in an article about how hard it is to find a suitable roommate in the Big Apple.