This Monday on Women’s Magazine for our first post trump show we will talk to Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson about the election and the new multiracial black and brown lead movements that helped win this election for the Democrats especially in the south,
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is a 35 year old Affrilachian (Black Appalachian), woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research & Education Center in New Market, TN. As a member of multiple leadership teams in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), Ash-Lee has thrown down on the Vision for Black Lives and the BREATHE Act. Ash-Lee has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of the National Bailout Collective, and is an active leader of The Frontline a united front working to prevent voter suppression among other issues. She is a long-time activist who has done work in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, for LGBTQUIA+ folks, for environmental justice, and more.
And we talk to Ginny Berson about the radical lesbian and feminist movements of the ’70s and ’80s which created an impetus to form more independent and equitable social and cultural institutions—bookstores, publishers, health clinics, and more—to support the unprecedented surge in women’s arts of all kinds. Olivia Records was at the forefront of these models, not only recording and distributing women’s music but also creating important new social spaces for previously isolated women and lesbians through concerts and festivals.
Ginny Z. Berson, one of Olivia’s founding members and visionaries, kept copious records during those heady days—days also fraught with contradictions, conflicts, and economic pitfalls. With great honesty, Berson offers her personal take on what those times were like in her new book “Olivia on the Record: A Radical Experiment in Women’s Music” where she revisits the excitement and the hardships of creating a fair and equitable lesbian-feminist business model—one that had no precedent.