Women, Leadership & Human Rights

Join us Wednesday, May 23rd at Hughes-Trigg Student Center on the SMU Campus at 7:30pm to hear Nobel Peace Prize laureate, peace activist, & author Leymah Gbowee speak on “Women, Leadership & Human Rights”. For more information or tickets call 214-965-8412 or click here.

About Leymah Gbowee – In 2008, the critically-acclaimed and award-winning documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which is having its U.S. television premiere on October 18 as part of PBS’s Women, War and Peace, featured a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia. Their demonstrations culminated in the exile of Charles Taylor and the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female head of state.

One particularly charismatic woman among them was Leymah Gbowee, (who former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has said “should be a lesson to all of us”). Gbowee helped organize and then lead the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia’s ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. Gbowee emerged as an international leader who changed history, marking the vanguard of a new wave of women taking control of their political destiny around the world.