Since 1975, International Women's Day is celebrated around the world on March 8. It was first established in 1909, when the Socialist Party of America decided to commemorate the March 8, 1908 strike of women garment workers (mostly immigrants) in New York City to demand better labor conditions. At F&M, every year the Programs in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and International Studies partner with the Alice Drum Women's Center to recognize International Women's Day through a week-long series of programs. 

March 7, 2019
Common Hour with Tsitsi Dangarembga 

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean author, filmmaker, and activist, whose work has been influential on a global scale. Her first novel, Nervous Conditions, explores the multifaceted impact of colonial rule on "native" subjects, especially women, and the ways in which they are caught in-between cultures, aspirations, and subject positions. Her latest novel, This Mournable Body, returns to some of these questions from a post-colonial perspective. As a filmmaker, she has produced documentaries on the effect of HIV/AIDS in postcolonial Africa, as well as a feature film exploring questions of gender relations within Zimbabwean society.  During her Common Hour interview by Patrick Bernard, Associate Professor of English and Program Chair of Africana Studies, and Harriet Okatch, Assistant Professor of Biology and Public Health, Dangarembga shared her work as a woman writer from Zimbabwe, whose writing focuses on other women and their experiences in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

A post-Common Hour reception and book signing was hosted by Ware College House in the Ware College House Great Room.