Diane Rosenfeld
Diane Rosenfeld is a lecturer on law and the founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 2005. Prior to that, she taught at Harvard College in the Women, Gender and Sexuality department. She is also a Visiting Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
Diane has spent the past two decades creating innovative approaches to preventing intimate partner violence through a reconceptualization of rights and accountability. As she said back in 1994, “domestic violence homicide is so predictable as to be preventable.” Much of her work has been animated by that principle.
She created the first seminar on Title IX with a focus on campus sexual assault in 2007 and has taught it every year since at Harvard Law. Her work to articulate the rights of students to an education free of sexual harassment or abuse informed the national conversation about these important issues.
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Diane lives outside of Boston with her husband and her adorably rambunctious Portuguese Water dog, Harry.
Photo credit: John R. Boehm
The Bonobo Sisterhood:
Revolution Through Female Alliance
#BeBonobo
Her book The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, with a foreword by Ashley Judd, offers a new roadmap for gender equality; one made possible through the creation of female alliances. Bonobo apes, our evolutionary cousins, have achieved a society free of male sexual coercion. How? Through females coming together to protect one another in a collective self-defense. Rosenfeld argues that humans can adopt this model to change the fundamental power imbalance in our society.
The artist and activist Shepard Fairey created the stunning cover for the book. He said “the time is NOW to engage the world with these important ideas about sisterhood. The female symbol chain incorporates a fist to represent the revolutionary power of female alliance.”
Diane is focused on sharing the message of The Bonobo Sisterhood far and wide. To enact the sisterhood, she recently established The Bonobo Sisterhood Alliance which is currently in development.
