The Women’s Resource Center and the department of gender and race studies will continue their monthly Brown Bag Lecture Series Wednesday afternoon in Garland 203 with presentations from two political science doctoral candidates.

Laura Merrifield Sojka will be presenting a lecture titled “Petticoat Politics: The Life and Legacy of Lurleen Wallace,” and Lindsey Smith will present “Sororities and Subordination: Narratives of Critiques.”

(See also “Shiftless and clueless: the state of Alabama politics“)

Sojka said her talk will highlight the political career of Lurleen Wallace.

“The reason I got interested in this and started doing all this research is, you know, we have Lurleen Wallace Boulevard and Lake Lurleen, and you think, ‘Gosh, they named a ton of things after the First Lady, when it turns out she was actually our state’s only female governor,’” Sojka said. “I think it’s very interesting because Alabama isn’t necessarily a bastion of feminist progressivism, yet we had a female governor before any other state in the South, excluding Texas.”

Smith’s talk will examine the ways women in sororities and women who are not in sororities can unite to overcome prejudices.

“How do we create communities that allow for women of color or women with different sexual orientations or different lifestyles to have conversations with women who are white, Christian, Greek women?” Smith said. “What my presentation is going to look at is the intersection of those things and the space for this type of community of women to exist together.”

(See also “Student groups promote diversity“)