“We Dissent” was designed to challenge the concept of unified feminist waves. As an example, Jeanjean references the second-wave feminists, often contextualized as being all bra burnings and birth control. But the 1960s itself is better defined by the civil rights movement, labor organizers, and other fights for equality that intersect with but are not limited to gender. Students of the school are expected to attend, and many of them are working on projects related to the materials on display. While most were familiar with the work Jeanjean cited as being considered emblematic of second-wave feminism (mainly the pill and Roe v. Wade) few were aware of the reproductive justice movement that fought forced sterilization and other abusive practices by gynecologists who were also eugenicists. Other visitors have included women who held the signs or made the posters at the protests the show documents; while Jeanjean led me around, a woman named Denise Petrizzo approached us and introduced herself as both a film editor and a member of WAC, offering her own personal footage of a protest she attended in the 1990s. She had already visited the show the week it opened, FaceTiming a fellow WAC member who couldn’t be there.
The digital concerns Jeanjean, who mentions that if we were to lose electricity we can lose the internet. This is, in many ways, the connection between what exists online and what exists in our hands: both can be destroyed. Fire, flood, the oils on our fingerprints—all of that can turn history into dust. Anything can be forgotten. Maybe worse is that the past can be changed in service to simplicity, an easier recollection at the expense of too much to say. These artifacts are prompts. They carry meaning not to replace recollections but to hold memory.
Our perception of feminism requires, according to Tochilovsky, a reactive examination: a willingness to see history with more depth than what exists on the surface.