Oh, I don't know.
I was about her, thought about the Women's Studies Program.
I'm going to try to remember to watch it so it doesn't stop on us.
Are you going to ask?
Yes.
Why don't you start at the beginning of your involvement with the Women's Studies Program?
I came to Albany as what was called the first outside director of Women's Studies.
Previous directors had gotten either no leave or some part-time leave from their departments
to run the program, but I was the first person hired from the outside explicitly to run women's
studies.
I was the promise that after three years we would hire someone else and I would rotate
into my own discipline which was sociology.
Sociology would have been where I would get tenure, but as opposed to current directors
and faculty members in Women's Studies, I was off track as director.
Part of the rationale, and I think a good one at the time, was that there was so much
to do that I might not be able to publish as much as sociology would want in some sense
that food.
It was both helpful and harmful since I had come with five years of prior service.
It meant that I couldn't even come up for tenure until I had been working for, I could
see, I kept for eight years for eight years.
I did wait a little longer after that so that it kind of lengthened the amount of time
before I had tenure.
It did free me, and that was a big plus.
I didn't need to pay as much attention to the demands of sociology as I might have.
It also put me in an interesting position coming from the quote-unquote outside.
I had come from the University of Washington being of the generation like Joan Schultz, who
was the previous director, self-taught in Women's Studies.
There were no courses in Women's Studies.
I had taught as a graduate student the second course ever on Women at Johns Hopkins University,
and at that point we had to draw from four different disciplines just to teach the one
course.
Now, I could teach a tiny topic in one discipline and make a whole course out of it.
So that kind of acknowledged explosion had been tremendous.
But when I went to the University of Washington, they were one of the earlier programs in
fact.
I think it's here they're celebrating a 25-year.
I got excited about my involvement in Women's Studies there, although I was hired in sociology.
I got to a position where I wanted to have more involvement and was looking for such a job
when I came here.
That was how I came, as part of my general search for a job where I could use my self-training
in Women's Studies.
I had been involved in the National Women's Studies Association.
In its founding, I had been a regional rep.
And I wanted to make some use of those skills and came here to do that.
And I thought this was an ideal job because sociology would know they were getting a
Women's Studies person.
Where is the University of Washington?
And I had not been entirely thrilled with the fact that I wasn't a mainstream stratification
person.
So for me, it was a good opportunity to take things on.
And I enjoyed it because for me, it was a chance to feel like my politics and my job were
the same thing for a change and not feel very split between community activism or even
academic activism that wasn't my job.
But to actually have a job that combined the two, I felt like I was sort of remaking
myself.
And it was a nice opportunity for me.
At the same time, I was very aware that I was coming into an established community that
had very much nurtured this program.
And I think for a long time, I also felt inspected as to whether or not I was going to come up
into the community standards of what feminists should be doing.
And although there was a big feminist community, I also felt that I was to make my own way
and not necessarily become best friends with people who are best friends already.
It was also structurally a difficult position.
And we were saying earlier, because I was the only person who was truly responsible
to women's studies.
It was my full-time job, and I had a half-time secretary, and everybody else had joined
your adjunct or affiliate kinds of positions with the program.
But nobody, as happened later, got their 10 years through women's studies.
I wasn't going to, but there was no one else who was ultimately responsible for what happened
in women's studies.
So it meant for some way the sense of isolation, we were over in humanity's building at the
time, and I'm a social scientist.
And I started in the middle of the...
It was on the third floor.
Well, up on the third floor, I moved down to being kind of mixed with Slavic and English
on the second floor.
And so the people around me, especially kind of an auntie floor, people didn't tend to
come in.
And they weren't in my discipline either, so it sort of felt like me and the secretary,
not in terms of the fellowship of the...
So, our fellowship of the people involving women's studies, but in a day-to-day way, I
didn't run into women's studies colleagues.
And that feeling came about in another way in that at that point in time, women's studies
was run by...
Do you want to call it program committee?
Yes, it was a women's studies committee.
Yeah, the committee.
It was a good advisory committee.
Women's studies advisory committee.
And that was made up of a mixture of people who were interested in the program, including
faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as some community people.
And there was a sense that I would often have that everybody could talk about what we
should do, but ultimately, the we with me.
And I learned that I really had to choose how much I could do and work on the things that
were important.
My explicit task was to change the major from what has been a student-initiated major
into a faculty-initiated major.
And it later became a state registered major.
But prior to my coming, it had been students creating their own major and recreating their
own major each time through the interdisciplinary studies option that undergraduate students
could do.
And so my goal was, we of course encouraged people to take particular courses in creating
that major.
And to concretize that by making the faculty-initiated major.
And that's what I did.
I guess that work didn't get fully completed till the end of my three-year term.
But nonetheless, I did accomplish that.
The other goal was to try and keep and maintain community involvement.
So I think I had a lot of lunches in that period.
I'm not a lunch person, but I ate a lot of lunches in that period.
I tried to get to know everybody who's involved in a new studies program, but also anybody
knew who came to campus who might be involved.
In some cases, people who might have been oppositional just to get to know what the opposition
was to basically feel out women's studies place in the institution and make friends because
I thought that perhaps one of the things that happened was not to anybody's fault, but
a structural thing is you're fighting for space for a new program, the people who fight
after a while get to be seen as the fighters.
And it was an advantage to me to come in from the outside and not have fought or debated
with anybody else.
But instead to come in and be the person who was nice.
But harm, of course.
But having had no negative history with anyone.
And I think that was facilitated by the fact that at that point in time there was a new
dean, John Schumacher, who was relatively young at theme's go, progressive and interested
in fostering anything that you wanted to do.
Basically if you had an idea and you wanted to build on it, he was interested in you're
doing it.
And it was a kind of attitude that was extremely helpful in terms of building up women's studies.
I felt that we were respected as a program treated as an equal to other department chairs
going to chairs meetings.
And I also think that facilitated our May and hour cross university contacts.
I met not only other people in the humanities college, but we represented the program.
On the undergraduate advisory committee and so on.
And so I got to be kind of ambassador as it were for the program in many realms.
And it was good for me because I got to scout out other people who might be interested
and build ties and lines, even as only a friendship with other colleagues.
For me it was a very nice experience in countries, the University of Washington, which had been
three times as large and was very hard to ever get out of your building.
And meet other people and despite the fact that this campus has maybe 14,000 undergraduate
students and 3,000 graduate students, it was considerably smaller and more manageable
than the University of Washington.
So I think that helped me.
So I did do that kind of building links, I met and worked with people in the YWCA and
the group that ultimately created the women's building downtown all the way in.
And I think that was another thing that I was kind of successful at.
One of the things I changed, which was better for me, I'm not sure, I think it was better
for the program, was that the women's studies committee used to always meet at Joan House
and Joan is a wonderful hostess and would host the meetings all the time, making it in
that sense since it was a volunteer labor on people's parts, giving them sort of something
in the turn.
So I didn't see that personally as a good long-term strategy and that I found another way for
people to be more involved would be to rotate those meetings, both across different houses
but also between on campus and off campus because I think it tended to cut out a lot of
staff people when it was off campus in a way that it might not be on campus.
It also would have the pro and the con of having it on campus, of taking out some of the
social life aspect of it and making us focus a little bit more on the business and as we
became more of a department, we certainly weren't that yet, but as we moved in that direction
that was going to become increasingly important, not to lose those community feeling but at
the same time to feel like something was accomplished at the meetings I think that was
an important push for me.
I accomplished this by moving 20 miles out of town, I mean nobody would want to go over
here for a meeting.
It wasn't exactly my intent, I didn't move so little for that purpose, but I did think
that moving out of downtown would help and I personally was missing a country I never
intended to move 20 miles away, but it did end up having that purpose of forcing us to
rotate and it was something I wanted to happen and I personally believe that that was good.
I certainly think you got more people engaged in feeling responsible for hosting the department
and feeling involved in that way.
It didn't necessarily change my sense that everybody had ideas and I was supposed to
go build them, but I did feel that it helped make more people feel more involved and I
think although it was a small thing, it was kind of a transitional accomplishment that
I felt good about.
I remember something that you did when I joined the Women's Studies Committee.
The first meeting that I went to, there was some discussion about a feeling that there
was an in-group in the committee and a concern that people expressed about how difficult
it was for new people to get involved because of this.
I don't know who suggested it, whether you suggested it or someone else's, but the
suggestion was that rather than have you leave the meeting, coordinate the meeting, set
up the agenda that two new people would be elected and asked to volunteer to do it.
And Ellen Higgins and I volunteered and it was a wonderful way for us to get involved.
I mean, of course, I remember working very closely with you because we had to set up
a agenda.
I personally always appreciated that and was said to see that it didn't get carried through
very well.
And I don't know why.
I'd probably have to study my own work to remember why, but I do now that you mentioned
remember doing that.
And actually I thought it's part of what became your long-term involvement.
Oh, absolutely.
In a way, I'm not sure you would have been as involved.
Had we not done that both in doing surveys of people and creating the various library
booklets and resources, which really grew into major publications for you over time.
I'm looking at the coming of action to do it in a way that I think you probably wouldn't
have.
And in Ellen's case, ending up teaching for women studies.
And I did think that that was very important and something I was trying to have happen more.
And I thought it was appropriate for the committee to have its own chair separate of or chairs.
And I did think that was a good idea.
I think it worked out well for the two of you.
Because it made the body more of a body that had, you know, as a zone and gender, as
a zone that kind of gave me somebody to negotiate and talk with about those things.
And we also tried to set up committees and have various task forces.
And I think that was part of something I felt I was trying to do part of the sort of
networking with other people, whether or not certainly people said that they thought there
was an in-group.
I don't think I invented that.
I'm pretty sure I heard that.
They not have been you who said, well, I'm sure I repeated it.
But I know I occasionally felt that.
Whether or not it was felt by how many people it's hard to say.
That I do think that people came to feel that those who started the group, particularly
some of the core courses, had a greater investment in it.
And weren't always, as often as they might be, they have other people easily involved.
Now, some of that I don't think was a political decision as much a personal decision.
I can have only so many close friends.
And I can't have anymore.
But since there was a line with people who were some of the, not all, but some of the
people in the originators of the program, I think it did make it feel hard for some people
to break in.
And I know I made some conscious efforts to work with women of color to feel more involved.
And some of them said to me that they felt that I had done that more than prior directors,
which is not to say that other directors didn't care about those issues because I know
that personally they did.
But that I made them feel more like I wasn't coming to them just when we needed their
support on an issue, but rather to build up a general sense of what can we do together.
Which maybe you can't do so well when you're starting a program.
It might be easier for somebody from the outside.
But I think it comes in at some level of motion.
But I felt it was important to kind of reach out to the library, to women of color, to people
involved in campus internships to get them somewhat more involved.
And partly because I didn't think we could all do it by ourselves.
But I do think that sometimes that sense that they're being in groups made it for some
people feel that the issues were gay, straight issues, although I don't think they always were.
I'm sure they weren't always.
But sometimes they got to sign that way.
And I think for some people it wasn't issue of whether or not to be a woman identified
for other people.
I think it had as much of those people who were seen as being movers and shakers, which
isn't to say there weren't other people who had been movers but weren't being identified
as much.
But I think in some ways that was a little unhealthy and created some sense of divisions that weren't
necessarily good for the program.
Not necessarily real divisions or enduring divisions, but at certain ones I think melded
away.
People still talk about, somehow, they're being a core group when I think that who it is
is entirely changed and I no longer think that there's any kind of core groups in the
same sense, particularly because there is now core faculty and core faculty are by and
large not the same people who were the founders.
And I think that shifted things along a lot.
Another kind of shift that I feel I try to do both as first outside director of women
studies, but also later in my role as the founding director of IRO, the Institute for Research
on Women, was to get some focus on both research and graduate education.
The program has been found very much around undergraduate education, which I think was
appropriate at the time, not critique.
But I thought one of the things that we might do at less than kind of service orientation
and more for ourselves being at a research institution was to engage graduate students
more and to spend more time discussing our own research because it was very easy not
to really know what each other did in study.
I'm not sure that I was particularly successful in my year, three years as director in doing
that other than to kind of now and again say we should work on that kind of thing.
And I think the development with the work of Linda Nicholson on the certificate for women
and public policy in the end has done a most for that.
I know our graduate students and many other graduate students have been told into women
studies through that and the visibility of those courses have told in graduate students
into departmental courses in my case in sociology just because those costs must exist.
And that's been very important.
That's about as far as this kind of we've been trying to get a master's for a long time
but for a sort of reason that well beyond my term is director of women studies that's
been slow coming.
But it's made it for me all the more important that I found that the Institute for Research
on Women as the way for us to try and hold together around our research.
I'm not sure it's done as much as I would have liked but it is certainly I think raised
the stature of gender issues on campus by having a center around those issues particularly
in that we don't have a graduate program other than the certificate just yet.
I think it helps heighten our image on campus and I think it's been some pretty good
conferences and brought in some useful money around those issues.
Some of them in fact oriented towards curriculum like that you two different programs one
of which I was involved in incorporating Puerto Rican women into the curriculum.
And that's a live conference on race, that's in gender and the curriculum and the current
one on international I think in these studies.
I think have been good ways to sort of pull in both research and an undergraduate teaching
together around what we study.
What's your next question?
Well, some of the memorable people that were involved that perhaps aren't involved now
who came in with.
I guess maybe it's been too long.
I always blame it on nutrition so it's hard to remember.
Although I gave up diet, coconut, Pepsi, some time ago.
It's hard to remember everybody who's coming with, coming on.
Although there's the kind of category of people that I particularly think of in that vein
and those are the people who we paid from the outside to teach part time courses
when we didn't have as many full time or joint split position regular, quote unquote,
regular faculties we do now.
Large numbers of women who talk terrific courses.
I mean, I'm going to come up with it right now.
But Jackie Cain and...
We can jealous and other people have taught races and practice and sexism.
The women who also did our internship, who's now a retired Carol Riker.
And her partner, Altaugh, is a student...
Raffles.
Altaugh, a variety of courses on law, racism, practice, and sexism.
And take Carol Riker developed our internship program.
There's something I have pushed for and tried to develop placements, but she made it into a real program.
And I think really people outside of the university, the Dell Appraces and Classes and the Sixth is some of the key course,
not to mention...
Some of the day I knew from Rentaly or Villes at the last thing, I also don't remember right now.
We taught a women in science courses before we hired Bonnie and...
...Grow.
...Grow.
That's what sounds quite right.
But teachers of Samana could be...
Yeah, she's married to somebody who loved our campus and we're a viral.
Yeah, probably the right person.
Anyway, there've been a number of people like that who I think have been a key.
We had people who taught women and families.
Well, really helped branch out our curriculum when we didn't have faculty in those fields before the university hired anybody.
Now there's both less money for part-timers and we also have more people in diverse departments either.
Enjoy positions with women's studies or who are what we call now.
Or women's studies that faculty for whom all are part of their lines are in women's studies.
I'm very happy to have the people we have, but it's true that I think there are a lot of people who like that who I miss, who deserve.
I'm kind of a key place in what they did in developing women's studies.
There are also, I think, for important community people who are part of the U.S. Committee for a long time.
The Laura Schmidt, who I've been on many different committees with throughout the capital district, was always very important.
What the former affirmative action officer on campus that moved on to do that for the state and the active in now and the subsequent labor tires.
But I think her connections with the community were important.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other people, but she's one of the people I remember.
And I'm not sure how we would do that anymore other than through our internship, which I think is in the major way to do that, especially when we have the internship receptions.
And we get to see the mentors as well as the mentees.
But I guess there are still that there's that kind of class of community people who are in somewhat lost as well as the folks who had other jobs in this region who taught courses that have either become our mainstays or were important at the time, even though they either are courses we no longer teach or other people have picked them up.
Some of whose names we seem to have surfaced between them.
And I'm sure if I searched through my list, I could find many more like that.
Those are the people I met.
If I find this John Schumaker to me with a good being, and I was glad to see him move on to become a president of another campus, which would become a vice president here and another president of another campus.
But he was certainly one of the supportive things to me.
And I do this with him.
What about students?
Are there some memorable students?
It doesn't have to be when you're a director.
But John?
Yeah, there's a couple.
One of whom actually was in the military and that was how she gave her way to the students study.
She was one of the first for the faculty initiated majors.
She went on to become a lawyer and I've actually subsequently been one of the contributors to student studies funds and I am an initiative for women on campus.
And she's one of these ones kind of proud of.
You know, really went on and did some wonderful things.
But there are also just some non-human studies majors, the students I remember.
I actually am male in my sociology of gender class who started off by being sure that his generation was different from mine and that he described his life to me.
And I pointed out the contradictions and what he said his values were and what was happening around him, that he was obsessed by.
I was able to point out to him that actually his world was not all that different from mine and he needed to put together his ideology and his life.
Really nice kid who was so appreciative of that kind of knowledge that he nominated me for the same amount of awards from students for giving her contributions to teaching.
And I was always so flattered by that and that was one of the things we just do in the course of your teaching but he said to return the favor.
And it was a women's studies course, joined in sociology. And he certainly won when I knew you.
I'm sure there are more. I think I probably keep up more with the graduates to where women's studies interested but yet don't quite have a place to do it.
But people who did sociology of gender and have gone off to have faculty jobs that I'm really proud of some on.
Some of whom I actually knew was an undergraduate or a master like Annie Rochelle and a master student who then went off to do criminal justice and decided to do sexist work and came back and actually became a gender specialist and got her PhD and got engaged in women's studies.
And this now off teaching sociology and I believe it acting Annie Rochelle and she's acting director women's studies on her campus.
And doing really well and still doing things going to be proud of like getting money that you can independently course on sociology of the homeless.
And so those people I'm kind of proud of who started off.
The thing that I guess they had a longer history who started off in the beginning and have really quite made something of their lives that you could feel good about having had a small part in.
Some larger, some smaller but not the one who is proud of them. I wish actually we knew more about what became of our graduate.
I know some have gone off and wanted graded women's shelters and the life can it really be nice to know more of what they did than we do know.
But they definitely come to get us to run into some of them.
Even the small ones I've managed, somebody's selling clothes and some clothing store in the mall who I didn't recognize but who said remember me I was in your social gender class 10 years ago.
And I want to tell you what an impression it made on me.
And I think those things that always make you feel good when you know you've had an impact on people's lives.
And even though the two women I ran into working there seemed to have somewhat traditional lives in many ways.
They were doing part-time work and balancing part-time work with their children and they would be traditional, be killed work.
They clearly felt it had made them at least think about their choices.
Not as dramatic as somebody becoming a lawyer and contributing to one study.
But on the other hand how many professors do you remember? Can you tell your college education?
So I was pleased to listen to that kind of impact.
Well that's an interesting question.
What is the impact or what has been the impact?
And how has it changed over the years?
I mean we're in a different time and climate now than we were 20 years ago.
10 years ago.
Well the battles are different. I think the existence of women studies is somewhat more taken for granted.
Maybe majoring in it isn't anymore or less taken for granted but I think its existence is.
But the fact that the major isn't may not be as helpful as it might be.
I mean our numbers are certainly up.
But I mean the truth of culture is that.
But it's meant for lots of changes that acceptance has meant that we've grown.
One of the things I am proud that I was able to do that some people thought I wouldn't be able to do was to get the line to hire somebody to succeed me.
I even though I had been promised there was some doubt that it would happen.
I remember one of our one study colleagues who was actually working in the dean's office at the time I didn't think it would work.
And I persevered and it did work and I was first who was director for three years.
And she persevered and we hired Bonnie Spaniard.
She persevered for much longer before we could hire anybody else.
But then we were able to hire busy.
So we hired Bonnie Vivian, four people from the outside plus Lily Williams and the Pershing and Marjorie.
And other people have transferred their lines but there have been at least seven people.
I am forgetting.
We have a survey of who is not really any longer on campus.
But so we hired at least eight people and had two or three other people including Linda Nicholson and Francine Prank Transfer Parts of their lines and two of them in the study.
So we've become in that sense more stable.
We've grown it's given us a lot more control of our curriculum.
We've had more control of our budget.
We always had some supplies and equipment money.
But when I was director I always got out of charity of our hearts and any money towards hiring.
Now we have some real money that's allocated.
It may not be nearly what other departments get but it is more than that I got.
And it gives you a kind of control of your lives that we have much less of.
And I think that's going to be a real strength.
But in other ways I'm not sure that students go into women's studies for any different kinds of reasons.
There are certainly always people who do it for consciousness reason.
But there are people who want to be still what I would call a feminist and because they might not use those terms but going to women's services in some way to be lawyers for women to run better women's shelters to be editors of women's children's books.
There are a lot of kinds of reasons.
Usually with joint majors but we encourage that on the line.
And then there are people who do it because they see it going well with whatever their majors are.
Anything from literature to sociology and anthropology because it would help them in whatever they do if they're going to do personnel management or survey research or nursing teaching.
Whatever they see their clients or their co-workers are seeing women and so it helps them to understand that.
In that sense I don't think it's changed too much.
And the numbers haven't gone down.
I'm not sure if the students in fact they've gone out.
But I think the bottles who fight are different.
We now have to fight to retain what we want.
We have to fight to not be pushed back into program status and those faculty that would gain not certainly not fired but dispersed into the department or combined into some larger ethnic and women's studies department.
None of that has happened but we certainly have to in these economic times fight those battles in a way.
It doesn't help you move forward when you're doing so much re-reactions.
I'm figuring out how to get your FTEs up so you're not cut in the life.
I think it's going to change our orientation.
I don't think we're as far gone as the people who want to say there is no feminism or it's a pass.
I don't actually think that that's a problem in academics.
The study of gender is reasonably accepted.
It might be that disciplines will claim that there's nothing left for women to study to do because they each have one woman in their department to do gender things.
But I think if it's cut it will be part of fiscal retrenchment.
The department has been good at doing what we call service courses, diversity courses required in the individual distribution ones that help make it somewhat more key.
It doesn't guarantee that there won't be some massive movement backwards.
Women's studies has been somewhat mainstreamed.
We have done some of that work which was always important to do.
It was always a part of a dual-pronged strategy to create a space to really have women's studies but not to isolate women's studies from the risk of the discipline.
I see the core faculty now really talking about what is core to women's studies and what is our theory that isn't in other departments and what is truly interdisciplinary.
Kind of asking disciplinary questions in a sense.
Field questions that we certainly always talked about but weren't the focus of what we were doing.
We were talking about how we get a course in this or the other thing.
While that's certainly still a concern, the questions are different.
The more traditional disciplinary questions, not with traditional discipline answers.
The questions that get answered.
I think it also means that we've kind of evolved from having a women's studies advisory committee that had everybody on it to having first then a department where we had bold and faculty and everybody else to it's getting to be wasn't clear what everybody else was doing.
So that it was mostly the faculty and now I'm starting to hear discussions that are really the vein of we are the core faculty and the joint faculty who are often the people who founded the program are, I don't want to say second class citizens but perhaps have seen a two-tie to their own discipline and not going in the same trajectory as sometimes to feel.
So at least the discussion is that way. I don't think people are kind of dumb but there are sometimes the sense that the joint faculty who are in some sense, they only faculty in the beginning are now, they think we're secondary but secondary.
It's also true that joint faculty are always torn between their department and any introduced department and core faculty don't have to be and so in that sense this is a real structural difference that's true.
But it represents a kind of culling all along that, or since I came in 1978 and this is now 1997, almost the 20 years I end up culling process, that's scary thought.
I should also say I think when I came I thought it was going to be director for three years and go back to Seattle and I've known him here and I came here.
And here I am. But I just discovered that some of the things I just liked about the University of Washington were not about academics but about some of the structures that I met there and that I liked structures here better.
So I think that the part of the change will make it a different place and a more welcoming place.
Okay, well in the intermission duty, I'm saying that all the directors you've talked to and chairs, I didn't want to say if they've had a sense of what they want to do.
And I think that that's very much part of being a director, a chair, of having a vision of where you think things should go.
I don't think you probably can't be a very good director if you don't have a vision otherwise you're just a placeholder exactly.
And as I was saying earlier, I think some of what I ended up doing so much of it has to do with networking and linking women's studies to other departments was basically the kind of housework of administration of doing the things that keep you busy all the time,
having lunch with calling people, following up meeting new people, that do produce things but not so quickly that you're always busy but it's not quite clear what you're doing.
Although I do think that in the long run they have a product and just this one housework is not done, you can tell.
I think when that kind of administrative work isn't done, you can tell.
And people have to have a vision. And those visions have to shift because hopefully each director meets that vision or comes close to it and the next one comes in to try to fill another gap.
And I think that's one of the reasons that rotation of director and chair is very important.
And one of the reasons that I know I argued that it was kind of overwhelming after whatever nine years that's being a director and then chair to get a break partly because everybody deserves a break.
But partly just because sometimes different positions is good not to have anything wrong with anybody's particular vision but that I think that the building of different positions of what program and department can be as long as they're not done as a caretaker but really actively worked on in some feminist fashion can build things.
And I know I've always felt that it was important to bring women of different feminist persuasions to the program that different programs start with different resources.
And some start from a socialist feminist base, the concern for class others from a radical feminist base and yet others against them a liberal feminist base.
And I think our started primarily from a radical feminist base with bits and pieces of socialist feminist.
But I've always felt that it was important to bring in everybody who's at least a feminist, maybe not everybody who talks about gender because they've been pretty reactionate works on gender.
And every from all the branches of feminism because students should see all the branches they should know there isn't just one version of feminism and help them take and choose which is theirs without being turned off by the one they have to do as it isn't theirs.
And I see the variety of sponsors possible because in fact feminism is always changing certainly because I was director of postmodernism and had a large impact on the misstudy and really all the participants.
So one couldn't have...
And I don't think we need to have a postmodern woman studies program but we do have several people who do that as well as socialist feminist and liberal feminist.
And I think we've become more diverse in that way.
And I think that's very important.
I'm under division and by rotating chairs you can allow all those different visions and where they lead.
And hopefully with each one building and strengthening what went before rather than carrying down the prior.
I don't think we've ever had any of the issue of carrying down the prior and were things have gone by the wayside I think it's been more because the time was up for that idea than because the idea wasn't your church.
But I do think those visions are really important. I think we each had different ones.
I mean that sense having to be in as chair now, giving you an angle, concretizes what's always been a verbal commitment of the program to incorporate race and ethnicity as well as gender and class.
And while we've always talked about that, it took a while we've got our first moment of color on the core faculty and it's taken until 1976 to have the first director of chair.
She's me also from the outside, who is the woman of color.
I guess I don't really think until women of color have seen as the emphasis in women's studies as we're starting to do the things that we want to do.
But it's yet another step that we weren't able to do in the beginning because there's too much separation of women of color feminists with my feminists that had to be brought together before we all worked in the same program.
So I feel like it's a positive evolution.
It's really good.
It's healthy.
Yeah, only a century please.
Definitely good.
