Winter 2018 Theta Magazine

Many years after the founding of Kappa Alpha Theta, Bettie Locke Hamilton wrote, “We realized somehow that we weren’t going to college just for ourselves, but for all the girls who would follow after us.” While it’s inappropriate to apply current terminology, like feminist, to a woman who was born more than 150 years ago, and impossible to know, aside from what we can infer in her writing, what that woman thought, it seems reasonable to assume that Bettie at least hoped for a future in which women had achieved the same political, social, and economic rights as men.

Yet gender-based violence, a highly personal example of inequality, is the focus of this issue’s profile article. Rebecca Macy, Nu/Hanover, a distinguished professor at North Carolina University, conducts community-based research on gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking. Although it is disheartening to realize that women today face many of the same challenges our sisters faced in 1885, there is hope to be found in an evolving cultural zeitgeist and the strength derived from women supporting women.

Macy graces the cover of the Winter 2018 issue of the Theta magazine, and you can learn more about her work inside.