Rochelle Ruthchild will be delivering our Yom Kippur d'var. Rochelle grew up in Jersey City and Long Island. She discovered feminism and the women’s movement in 1969 in Berkeley, California and when she moved east to Boston, joined Bread and Roses and Female Liberation. She participated in many women’s movement actions, including a ‘chicks’ protest at WBCN, and the surprise ending of the 1971 International Women’s Day march, the occupation of the Harvard building at 888 Memorial Drive, Cambridge. The latter led to the creation of the Cambridge Women’s Center, the longest continuously operating community women’s center in the U.S.. The takeover and its aftermath are documented in the film “Left on Pearl,” for which she served as an Executive Producer.
In the 1970s she served as the head of the Feminist Studies section of the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate Program in Social Change. She has visited the Soviet Union and Russia numerous times, including two years as an exchange scholar, and is the author of Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917. She is currently a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis, and a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. An early Lesbian mother, Rochelle was married to BWC and A Besere Velt chorus member Vicki Gabriner until Vicki’s death in 2018.
