Radical Social Movements in the Village and the Battle for Free Speech

The Village at the turn of the 20th century was the center of numerous major movements seeking social change: labor, peace, birth control, civil liberties, women’s rights. Central to every one of these movements was an underlying principle: free speech — the right to dissent, to criticize, to protest. From Union Square to the Cooper Union, mass meetings inspired each movement, and allowed significant overlap and exchange between them. Join us as a panel of distinguished scholars and activists explores the importance of free speech campaigns in the trajectory of these movements, including how censorship both fractured and united these movements in common cause, and how the movements themselves served as crucibles in the modern American battle over free speech.

Moderated by recent ACLU president Susan Herman, panelists will particularly focus on the struggle for reproductive rights and labor union organizing, and will offer insights into what these histories tell us about the current political moment.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Communications and Media Studies at Fordham University; Amy Aronson, Chair.

Susan Herman is the inaugural Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Like Ginsburg, she served as General Counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. In October 2008, Herman was elected as the seventh President of the ACLU, a position she held until stepping down in January 2021. She has published articles in scholarly journals, popular press, and online forums, and written several books, including Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy (2011), which was awarded the Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. Herman has also written Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs for the ACLU and other organizations on a range of constitutional criminal procedure issues.

Ellen Chesler is a Columbia University-trained historian who has spent much of her professional career in government and philanthropy, bringing both practical and intellectual perspectives to her writing and advocacy on behalf of women’s rights. Currently a Senior Fellow at CUNY’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Affairs, she is the co-editor of several anthologies, and the author of more than 100 essays and reviews, as well as of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, which remains in print 30 years after its first publication in 1992.

Lara Vapnek is Professor of History at St. John’s University, in Queens, New York. She is the author of two books, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary (2015) and Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (2009), as well as many articles exploring the intersections between gender, race, class, and political activism. Vapnek is a Fellow to the New York Academy of History and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is currently writing a book examining the history of infant feeding in the United States from the 1850s through the present.

Geof Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. Geof joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1973. Over the years, he has served as Dean of the Law School (1987-1994) and as Provost of the University of Chicago (1994-2002). A leading constitutional scholar, Stone is the author or co-author of many books on constitutional law, including Social Media, Freedom of Speech and The Future of Our Democracy (2022) and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004), which won eight national book awards. He is a former Chair of the Board of the American Constitution Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, Stone chaired the faculty committee that drafted The University of Chicago’s Statement on Free Expression, which has since been adopted by more than eighty colleges and universities across the nation.

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