Exhibit: Women’s Experiences Around the World

March commemorates “Women’s History Month” in the United States since 1985. This month-long exhibition follows in the footsteps of the International Women’s Day celebrated around the world on March 8th. Initiated in 1911, International Women’s Day is a day when women are recognized for their extraordinary achievements and contributions in shaping human history, encompassing all national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic or political backgrounds. It is a day that focuses on inclusion and diversity, honors women’s past achievements and calls for action to get closer to gender parity across the world.

The Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, celebrating 50 years, invites you to join our celebration of women’s experiences across the multilingual and multicultural communities represented in our diverse and inclusive department.

This exhibit features several visual displays and a collection of artifacts. It is not meant to generalize women’s experience or suggest that all women are represented here. Women’s contributions are so vast and so significant that representation of “woman’s” experience would be impossible and minimalistic. Our goal is to introduce you to a few very important women and their contributions, both to celebrate them and to spread the word about the greatness of these individuals.

The visual displays found on the perimeter of the first floor of Bird Library depict groundbreaking women’s experiences and exemplify the multiple roles of women in many fields across every culture and language taught in the LLL department. Throughout the visual displays, one can find important commonalities among the diverse women’s experiences, based on their pioneering character, but also well-defined differences rooted in the different cultures. The original artifacts on display in the exhibit cases, shared by the members of the LLL department for this exhibit, intertwine cultural traditions and expectations with important innovations and advances driven by women around the globe.

Above all, the exhibit demonstrates that, by opposing traditional stereotypes in many cases, women across cultures have always played crucial roles in social movements and accomplished outstanding results in every field, including medicine, science, literature and politics. March and International Women’s Day are great opportunities to reflect on the rich history of women throughout the world and to recognize and celebrate all these successes.

We invite you to join LLL in celebrating 50 years of diversity and inclusion in our multilingual and multicultural community.