Carol Giardina’s talk, Gainesville, a Flashpoint of Feminist Revolution, will reveal Gainesville’s hidden history in the movement’s cutting edge breakthroughs. This free event in Ustler Hall on UF campus opens with a reception and book signing with the author at 4:30pm. Carol’s book, Freedom for Women, Forging the Women’s Liberation Movement 1959-1970 will be on sale there. Her talk follows at 5:30pm.

Carol began making referrals for then-illegal abortions in 1963 from her freshman dormitory at UF. By 1968, with Judith Brown, she co-founded Gainesville Women’s Liberation (GWL), the first women’s liberation group in the South and was representing GWL in the Miss America Pageant Protest in Atlantic City, NJ – the demonstration that put the movement on the world’s radar as beauty contest protests swept small towns and world capitals. Fired her from State job and blacklisted as “unemployable,” she was told that the protest had been entered on her “permanent record.” She joined a core of movement founders that developed and spread radical feminist theory. Carol continues to work for the feminist revolution today in the uncompromising “go for what we really want” spirit of the Sixties.

Carol Giardina is the author of Freedom for Women: Forging the Women's Liberation Movement (2010), and one of  the founding organizers of National Women's Liberation.