More than 3,000 incoming first-year students will explore how events of 50 years ago may affect the lives of modern women during this year’s Common Read discussions Friday, Aug. 31.
This is the seventh annual “Common Read” for new students, and this year the text is an article from Smithsonian Magazine about protests at the 1968 Miss America pageant. The goal of the program, which is part of Panther Academic Welcome, is to give new students a chance to get to know other incoming first-year students, to be exposed to the experience of college-level academic discussion and to meet faculty and staff from around campus. This year, for the first time, students will be grouped by schools and colleges.
This year’s Common Read will focus on a January 2018 Smithsonian article by Roxane Gay, “Fifty Years Ago, Protesters Took on the Miss America Pageant and Electrified the Feminist Movement.”
The article explores how protests at the 1968 Miss America Pageant brought the conversation about images and attitudes toward women into the mainstream.
UWM students, with the help of 56 facilitators from UWM faculty and staff, will have an opportunity to discuss how the protests shaped the modern feminist movement. They will also be able to look at how such current events as the Women’s Marches and the #MeToo movement are focusing on similar themes today, and how these changes have affected women of color and other marginalized groups.
Gay, the author of the Smithsonian article, will speak on campus Thursday, Oct. 25, at 7 p.m. in the Wisconsin Room of the UWM Union. Gay is the award-winning author of “Hunger” and “Bad Feminist,” which NPR named one of the best books of the year in 2014. A professor of English at Purdue University, her work analyzes issues around feminism, race, gender and sexuality.
The event, sponsored by Zeta Sigma Chi Multicultural Sorority and Student Involvement, is free to UWM students; $5 for non-UWM students; $8 for the campus community and $10 for the general public. Advance tickets are available at the UWM Union Information Center.
