Speech about Rachel C. Lewis by Professor Scott Proudfit of Elon University at the Spring 2014 ODK Awards

 

The Martha Smith Award for Women’s and Gender Studies is named for the Elon professor who first served as the coordinator of this minor from 1988 to 1994.  This year I am thrilled to be presenting this award to Rachel Lewis.  I am not a History professor and Rachel is not a History major but I wanted to start with an appeal: Study your history.  Here’s why.  Rachel is the president of EFFECT, Elon’s feminist organization (a group I co-advise with Becca Bishopric), and Rachel knows her history and she knows how history works. 

 

As an advocate for women and for the LGBTQ community, Rachel has already learned that progress is not a straight line.  Progress is queerer than that.  It is a spiral.  Picture the tornadoes that we gratefully avoided yesterday.  As Bertolt Brecht described in his 1938 play The Life of Galileo, history is repetition with change.  We fight the same battles over and over again, but, hopefully, there is progress upwards.  History is not a circle, but a spiral.  With each revolution, each repetition, we raise humanity a little higher.  I’ve never met a student more prepared to fight for the rights of those marginalized by gender and sexual orientation than Rachel because she’s ready to fight and fight again and fight again.  She’s in it for the long haul up that spiral.

 

The thing that other students, particularly women, tell me most often about Rachel is that they want to be her.  I’m not surprised by this, because Rachel is enviably fierce.  I’ll give you an example: When Rachel was taking tickets for the WGS/EFFECT-sponsored production of Vagina Monologues, two young men approached the ticket counter and sheepishly explained that they had forgotten to bring cash.  They asked if Rachel could just do them a favor and let them in.  Their expectant smiles revealed that they had gotten by on charm a lot in the past.  Rachel said, “What are you going to do for me?”  They seemed confused.  She explained, “I’ll pay for your tickets but you have to pay me back at our next EFFECT meeting which you will attend.”  What could they say but OK?

 

The way she sized up these young men would suggest that Rachel would make a great parole officer.  But based on her negotiation abilities, her intelligence, her public-speaking acumen, her confidence, I think she’ll actually be a politician—one I would vote for in a second.  With the help of her fellow executive board members, Rachel has turned EFFECT around in a short period of time, from an organization that almost disappeared a few years ago to arguably the most active (and activist) student group on campus.  I won’t tell you everything EFFECT has accomplished this school year because we don’t have the time.  However, I will say that EFFECT held more than 20 meetings this year, featuring talks by eight invited Elon professors; and, perhaps most impressively, with the money the group made from Vagina Monologues EFFECT was able to write a check for more than $1,800 to Family Abuse Services this spring.  That’s more than triple the amount that the group was given by SGA as a budget at the beginning of the year.  Clearly, feminism is a sound investment.

 

Rachel could have graduated a semester early next year, despite the impressive load she carried with her English major double concentration in Professional Writing & Rhetoric and Creative Writing, along with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.  Luckily, for EFFECT and for Elon, she has decided instead to go to school part-time throughout next year and to work as the Outreach and Collaboration intern at Elon Volunteers!

 

Rachel is a leader.  She is fierce.  She knows her history.  She knows what she’s up against.  She gives me hope.  Rachel Lewis.