WOMEN AND NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS

Abstract

Muriel Tillinghast is a human rights and community activist. She was a key organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and one of three female organizers who headed county projects in Mississippi in 1964. She and her staff were responsible for Washington, Issaquena and Sharkey counties. She became the second state coordinator for the Council of Federated Organizations, the umbrella civil rights organization which called for the famous Mississippi Summer Project. Ms. Tillinghast resides in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughters, Bayo Callender and Aisha Hinton, her two dogs and two cats. She does social services advocacy in health and child welfare, labor issues and legal referral. She has recently joined the administration of Children in Crisis, which specializes in finding and counseling runaways and kidnap victims.Patricia McFadden is a member of the African National Congress who fled South Africa because of her political activities, and hopes to go home soon. She did her D.Phil at Oxford, and does work on gender in Southern African society and politics. She is presently doing research in Dakar, Senegal. At the time a version of this paper was given at the Yale Law School in April 1990, she was Visiting Professor at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. She has three children, a son and a daughter still in South Africa, and a young son with her.