Just half a century ago, it was almost taboo for a woman to seek work in white collar America.

These days, things are rather different.

A quick look at the University’s demographics – majority female – shows how far society has come, even if it still has a way to go. Still, for one writer, feminists must look both directions along the path: where women are going and where they have been.

Poet and playwright Aralee Strange and author Laurie Stone will reflect on the history behind the women’s rights movement tonight at Flicker Theatre and Bar.

Rather than using a blatant and brazen style of speech, Stone approaches feminism with an intent to be more creative than political.

“Feminism should be about performing this understanding rather than just declaring it,” she said. “People become more interested when you tell a story.”

Stone will recite segments of a collective memoir called “The Face in the Mirror.” The memoir draws on personal stories of female authors over the age of 50 that reflect on life-changing events from when they were young adults.

One account from the Vietnam War era follows Stone as she finds friendship among a group of protesters on a snowy night in a Lower East Side restaurant in New York City.

While attending New York’s Barnard College, a women’s liberal arts school affiliated with Columbia University, Stone learned of the prestigious writer Joyce Johnson’s exposure to discrimination.

Johnson struggled academically because male professors were bitter about teaching female students at Barnard during that time, Stone said. Real life examples of oppression such as Johnson’s often inspired Stone to fight for social change.

As a feminist writer, Stone likes to tell the stories that someone else wouldn’t bother to recount. She said an anecdote has the ability to be interpreted in multiple respects, allowing people to truly think for themselves when finding a moral stance on a particular issue, especially women’s rights.

“The planet is involved in a real debate [over]whether women are really human,” Stone said. “A lot of what’s going on between Western and Eastern cultures is whether women are considered fully human.”

In Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being and the Sri Ram Sena in India”, women were consistently considered inferior in different parts of the world. Stone believes the American feminist movement has come a long way in proving the influence women can have on the world, but the movement still has more to accomplish.

“What happened in the last 40 years is a global communication. The tentacles [of the feminist movement] moved out,” she said.

However, Stone emphasizes the movement is one based on grassroots with a top-down structure that stresses individual participation to produce an effect on society.

“Although the feminist movement has accomplished many of its goals on paper, it’ll take centuries to change the social role of women in people’s minds. Additionally, the ‘feminist’ movement is not exactly a unified front. Like Christianity, it’s a bunch of general ideas applied and sought after in a lot of different ways,” said Angela Victoria Pocta, a freshman comparative literature and Russian major from Augusta.

With a young Democrat leading our nation, Stone believes the Obama administration will embrace a more progressive stance concerning women’s rights. Noting Obama’s high self esteem and confidence, Stone said his personality is partially due to being raised by a single mother.

“The culture of Obama’s mother didn’t make her feel freakish or wrong,” she said, explaining how the progress of the first women’s movement affected our President.