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Join the Smith College Clubs of Southeastern CT, Maine, Philadelphia PA, Chicago IL, Los Angeles CA, San Antonio TX, Charlotte NC, Boston MA, Lehigh PA, and Northeastern NY to hear this lecture led by Martha Ackelsberg, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita of Government and Professor Emerita of the Study of Women & Gender.

The pandemic exacerbated and exposed many inequities in U.S. society. Media reports documented many of these: higher rates of severe illness and death in communities of color; the role of prisons as spreaders; the opening of private schools, as millions of public school students struggled with remote learning; and the substantial correlation with social class evinced by disparities between workers who could stay at home and those stocking grocery and pharmacy shelves and delivering meals and groceries. This talk will explore these inequities and our society’s ability to address them with public policy.

Martha Ackelsberg joined the Smith faculty in 1972, was appointed Five College 40th Anniversary Professor in 2006, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in 2007. She retired at the end of 2014. While at Smith, Ackelsberg participated in the Project on Women and Social Change from 1977–87 and helped create what became the Women’s Studies Program (currently the Program on the Study of Women and Gender). She also taught occasionally at Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and spent a semester (two terms) on a faculty exchange at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Sussex. Since her retirement, Ackelsberg has been living in New York City, and devoting her time and energies to addressing some of the massive racial inequities that plague U.S. society.