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Cuban feminist scholar to visit Cascade Campus

Photos and story by Abe Proctor

The status of women in modern Cuba will be in the spotlight when internationally renowned feminist scholar and author Dr. Norma Vassallo visits С��è��ý on Monday, April 28. Dr. Vassallo, chair of women’s studies at the University of Havana, is appearing in Portland as part of a nine-city speaking tour of the United States. She will speak from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the Moriarty Arts & Humanities Building Auditorium at С��è��ý’s Cascade Campus, 705 N. Killingsworth St. The event is free and open to the public.

Trained as a psychologist, Dr. Vassallo’s research has explored how women’s roles in Cuban society – as well as their perception of those roles – has changed since the revolution. Her research suggests that even as the revolution has led to a changing understanding of the definition of Cuban womanhood, the new burdens of the socialist experiment there exist right alongside the traditional demands of motherhood and domestic life.

“We are in the presence of a generation that is beginning to be the transmitter of subjective changes derived from the objective transformations that have benefited women,” she wrote in a 1997 study, “but it is a generation that still cannot liberate itself entirely from what constitutes one of the greatest perceived barriers against women’s self-realization as human beings — their leading role in domestic life.”

Dr. Vassallo’s visit is sponsored by the С��è��ý Internationalization Initiative and the Cascade Campus Division of Liberal Arts and Pre-College Programs. For more information, contact Rachel Stevens at (971) 722-5230, or at rstevens@pcc.edu.