My Profession and My Passion:
Reflections on Forty Years of Women's Studies
Estelle B. Freedman
Stanford University
Keynote Address Presented at the Fortieth Anniversary of the
Women and Gender Studies Program
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, Michigan
October 23, 2015
Please do not quote, cite, reproduce, or circulate without permission of author.
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It is an honor to participate in this celebration and I thank Dr. Linda Pritchard for
the invitation and especially for her request that I reflect personally as well as
institutionally on the past 40 years of women's studies. I hope to show you why I have
remained committed to this field, the ways that it has transformed over these decades,
and what has gone into the staying power of this once–and sometimes still–
controversial academic enterprise.
I want to begin by situating both myself and the field of women's studies at the
outset of this period. Forty years ago, in 1975, I was finishing my dissertation at
Columbia University, writing about the history of women's prison reform. I had become a
feminist in the early 1970s and felt eager to explore past women's movements. There
were no women on the US history faculty, but luckily for me one summer school session
the eminent feminist historian Gerda Lerner taught two classes that provided my first
immersion in the field that would become my profession and my passion. 1975 was also
my first year of teaching—I was an instructor at Princeton University, a school that had
admitted women only five years earlier and still had very few on the faculty. A
combination of my intellectual interests, my feminist politics, and my alienation at
Princeton made women's studies not just an interest but a necessity for me.
Princeton was as conservative a school as one could find in the Ivy League and
even beyond, and I felt very much an outsider there--not only as a woman in a very
male bastion, but also as a Jew in an historically anti-Semitic and racially exclusive
institution, and as a newly self-identified lesbian in a homophobic environment (the
rooms of students who displayed a gay rights banner were fire-bombed while I was
there).
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A key inspiration for my first courses on women was the band of equally
alienated feminist undergraduates, including some radical women of color. They
successfully petitioned for several "student initiated courses" and they asked me to
teach them: one on U.S. women's history and one on Women in Third World
Revolutions, a class in which the students and I created the curriculum together.
I was also sustained by a handful of other young women faculty (including
members of my first feminist study group and my first consciousness-raising group). As
we read the new literature of feminist scholarship and shared the pains, and some
triumphs, we experienced, we decided to organize academically. We declared a
Committee on Women's Studies and authorized ourselves to recommend that the
university institute a program (which it would eventually do, in 1982). Back in 1975,
however, I was applying for every job I could, with a target of moving to California.
California dreaming had a lot to do with my personal quest for new beginnings,
far from my East Coast origins, but it also made sense in terms of the direction of my
teaching and scholarship. I was already aware that the first women's studies program
had been established at San Diego State University in 1970; other California State
University campuses, as well as UC Berkeley, were also creating programs, as were
state colleges elsewhere, including Eastern Michigan. When the National Women's
Studies Association formed in 1977 there were already 276 programs in the U.S.
These first women's studies programs built on earlier and simultaneous demands
by students and faculty who initiated Black Studies, Native American Studies, and
Chicano Studies – all groups once excluded from entrée into academia and excluded as
subjects of scholarly study, and each proudly linking its politics of identity to demands
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for social change. Not surprisingly, women's studies programs were considered radical
enterprises and were not always welcomed – especially at the most elite research
universities or on conservative campuses. Women's Studies was breaking the rules by
acknowledging its political edge rather than adopting a tone of total academic
objectivity; for its experimental pedagogy that privileged female voices and experiences;
and for its interdisciplinarity and eclectic methodologies. Moreover, by the 1980s, the
conservative national climate put women's studies (along with feminism generally) on
the defensive—just as the first generation of feminist scholars and women's studies
programs came of age.
Here my personal journey may be illustrative of both the opportunities and the
resistance to women's studies at the time. In 1976 I finally landed a job in California –
not at any of the state colleges or universities I applied to, but in the Stanford University
history department, the second woman hired there. (A wise senior woman historian,
hearing of my move from Princeton to Stanford, commented prophetically: "from the
frying pan into the fire.") But I was happily departing for the Bay Area, where I expected
it would be far easier to be both a feminist scholar and a lesbian. I had already met one
Stanford feminist faculty member, anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and we
soon became close colleagues. There were several other faculty members across the
disciplines writing and teaching about women and gender, and there was already a
newly established Stanford Center for Research on Women.
As at Princeton, a small group of Stanford women faculty authorized ourselves to
begin coordinating courses on women. We also began meeting to educate each other
about scholarship on women in our respective disciplines and began co-teaching some
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interdisciplinary courses. In 1980 several of us began a five-year stint editing the
interdisciplinary feminist journal SIGNS. We held conferences, we edited a collection of
primary documents about Victorian women, we had pot lucks, we had meetings . . . My
junior faculty years were filled with meetings on all these fronts, building friendships and
collegial relations with other feminists who also longed for community outside their
departments.
Together we sought to establish an undergraduate program that we chose to
name Feminist Studies – in part to align ourselves with the emerging field of "feminist
scholarship," in part to indicate that the program was not for women only, and in part to
acknowledge our role as an educational arm of the feminist movement. In 1981 we
gained approval to be listed as an Inter-Departmental Major, which meant that students
could individually apply to a university committee to declare Feminist Studies and then
follow a curriculum template we had established. Shelley Rosaldo and I co-chaired the
program in its first year and I taught the first interdisciplinary feminist studies senior
seminar.
By the time that first class graduated in 1982, however, both the program and my
career were in crisis. Shelley Rosaldo died from a tragic fall while doing field work, and
while I was still grieving this loss, the dean of my school rejected my department's
recommendation for promotion with tenure. My first book had won a women's studies
publication prize from the University of Michigan Press, and I had won two major
teaching awards, but the deans decided that I did not meet the standards for promotion.
Without going into detail (I've written about the meaning of the case in an essay
included in my book Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics), I want to focus on the dean's
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stated reasons for denying my department's recommendation of tenure since they
speak to the atmosphere at the time. For one, my participation in the Feminist Studies
program was not considered academic work (as, say, building an Urban Studies or
American Studies program might be); rather, he deemed it to be a "cause" –
comparable, a dean explained, to founding a campus chapter of the National
Organization for Women. Moreover, Feminist Studies, he felt, had not yet proven itself
as a legitimate academic concern – it might be a temporary fad; it could disappear, but
tenure would mean, as he pointed out, that Estelle Freedman could still teaching be at
the university as long as the 2020s, presumably a vestige of a failed academic
enterprise. In retrospect we have proven him dead wrong, but at the time his
devaluation of feminist scholarship could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy: deny
tenure and deny resources and the field certainly would not flourish.
Another infuriating ground for the denial was that my teaching (which had won
the Dean's award!) had been downgraded to merely "very good" because it was
allegedly too narrowly focused on women, as was my scholarship. Some thought that
was a code for lesbian. To me, the judgement of narrowness implied that women were
simply not that important, not worth all that attention. I could not let these judgements
go unchallenged, not because I longed to remain at Stanford but because they
challenged the legitimacy of the movements—women's studies and feminist scholarship
–that sustained me and in which I believed passionately. So I filed an internal
"grievance" to the Dean, with support from many history and Feminist Studies
colleagues—and with the knowledge that a U.S. Appellate Court had recently ruled that
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discrimination against the subject of women constituted illegal discrimination against
women.
Fortunately, I was not alone in my outrage. Soon the "Estelle Freedman Case"
became a symbol of the perils of feminist scholarship and program building, addressed
in the national press. A letter-writing campaign made it harder, I think, for the university
to ignore my complaint; a fund-raising committee helped foot the legal fees (including
grad students who designed and sold t-shirts that adapted the words of a nineteenth-century feminist: "Sisters, bloody feet have worn smooth the path by which you came
here"). With my brilliant labor lawyer, Marsha Berzon (who now sits on the Ninth Circuit
U.S. Court of Appeals) I the grievance, the equivalent of a long legal brief that showed
the discriminatory nature of many of the dean's arguments. Perhaps the outside
pressure, along with fear of a broader class action suit, influenced the Provost, who
conducted a lengthy investigation before ruling in summer 1983 to grant me tenure,
overturning his Dean (who soon left the university).
My ordeal was not a singular one, as I learned personally and through historical
perspective. Even as I gained job security, the field of women's studies was under
attack. In the 1980s and 1990s feminist scholars around the country were fighting for
their jobs, and their programs. Indeed, dozens of faculty members consulted with me
over their own tenure cases, and I tried to pass on my survival tactics to them. Some
left academia, some went to court, some won major victories. Opposition came from
varied fronts. Conservatives, including women like Christina Hoff Sommers, accused
Women's Studies programs of everything from flabby scholarship to fostering
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lesbianism to ruining the lives of boys and men. On my campus we still faced
skepticism. When our Feminist Studies program applied for degree-granting status in
1990, after a decade of individually-designed majors and with a growing numbers of
affiliated faculty teaching courses, one dean professed that a Stanford degree would
include the term feminist on it only "over my dead body." We prevailed, and he
managed to survive the issuing of Feminist Studies degrees.
These challenges to women's studies in the 1980s and 90s were not isolated but
part of larger political campaigns against liberalism in education and in society,
paralleled by the demonization of labor unions, welfare recipients, and lesbian and gay
artists and more. Government and private foundation support for women's studies
declined. Women's Studies programs provided grist for conservative critiques of moral
decay, which remained powerful both regionally and nationally. In 2002, for example, a
state legislator tried to defund the program at the University of Arizona because of
complaints of "lesbian undertones" in a literature course. Less than a decade ago neoconservative critic David Horowitz included on his list of "The 101 Most Dangerous
Academics in America" the likes of feminist scholars Bettina Aptheker, Mary Frances
Berry, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alison Jaggar, Mari Matsuda, and Gayle Rubin.
But even as some skeptics tried to diminish women's studies as mere
consciousness raising and political rabble-rousing, the field itself was becoming more
academically sophisticated. To some, women's studies seemed to be fragmenting in
multiple directions during its second and third decades. In the 1980s, internal feminist
critiques that the subject of "women" masked not only differences of race, class, and
sexuality but also relations of dominance among women created what I consider to be
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highly productive tensions that helped the field mature and to make intersectionality a
foundational tenet. Building on these critiques, as well as on deconstructionist theories,
humanities scholarship in particular questioned the very category of woman and sowed
the seeds for the emergence of queer theory during the 1990s and trans* studies in the
early 2000s. Equally important, feminist scholarship began to question its westerncenteredness, to relate gender to histories of colonial relations and their legacies, and to
create transnational dialogues.
In short, despite resistance, the field of women's studies became academically
entrenched, with over 800 programs in the U.S. by 2007, including BA, MA, and PhD
degrees. By 2015, dozens of women's studies programs and centers had been
established in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Over these decades, a range of
academic journals published cutting edge scholarship, among them: SIGNS; Feminist
Studies; Gender and Society; Feminist Review; Hypatia; Women's Studies Quarterly;
Women's Studies International Forum; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism;
GLQ (Gay Lesbian Quarterly); Journal of Lesbian Studies; and, most recently, TSQ
(Transgender Studies Quarterly).
That list points to another way in which women's studies has transformed over
the past two decades, despite the external attacks and in response to internal critiques.
What we call our enterprise exemplifies the historical process of renaming. Though the
title "Women's Studies" seemed to dominate the early programs, "Gender Studies" had
first appeared in the 1970s, sometimes to avoid seeming too rooted in the identity
politics of "women's studies." But during and after the 1990s, gender made a major
comeback in response to both the theoretical critiques of the category woman and to
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broadening research agendas that included men and masculinity. With the emergence
of LGBT and queer studies, many programs expanded their acronyms to signal their
inclusiveness via "Sexuality Studies" or Gender and Sexuality Studies. Another trend
was the addition or substitution of the term Feminist in program names, particularly at
the graduate level, such as the Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, or Cornell
in 2002 renaming its undergraduate program "Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies."
Some lament the invisibility of women in these titles, using the EMU strategy of "Women
and Gender" studies, while to others that name seems redundant.
Stanford went through its renaming last year, in part because a younger
generation of students wanted the program to center more on queer, trans and genderqueer subjects, and faculty were offering more queer studies classes. The program
created a queer studies minor track and rethought its name. Founding faculty like me
agreed that we needed to stretch our identity but did not want to sacrifice the term
feminist (especially given our history of having to defend it at every turn.) And so we,
too, became a Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS).
Aside from labels, significant transformation in staffing and resources has
reshaped women's studies programs, with wide variation by school and region. The
range of institutional frameworks runs from minors to majors to honors, to M.A. and Ph.
D. programs; from programs to departments; from voluntary participation in an
interdisciplinary program by department-based faculty (Stanford's model), to joint
appointments with departments, to departmental status with the ability to hire faculty, to
endowed chairs that now entice senior scholars to direct programs (as is now the case
at Princeton).
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These latter examples, of free-standing departments or programs with the ability
to hire independently, speaks to the successes of women's studies over the decades as
it moved from outsider to insider status, from a band of discontents to institutional
integration, respect, and resources. As many others have commented, that
transformation can come at a price. Unlike Princeton and Stanford, many early women's
studies programs grew out of, or in tandem with, community-based feminist institutions.
As programs became institutionalized, so did their faculties. Some scholars remained
connected to feminist communities in their teaching and research. Others pledged their
primary allegiance to the college or university, sometimes rising in the ranks to positions
in which they might enable women's studies . . . or not. Another price has been the
demands of scholarly output, which can diminish energies for connecting outside the
university. Further, the turn in some disciplines towards more theoretical and/or esoteric
language can make feminist scholarship less accessible to wider audiences.
And yet, many programs have continued to excel academically while preparing
students for the challenges of feminism after commencement. Our own program, for
example, still requires that majors complete a "practicum," such as an internship in a
women's, feminist, or LGBTQ organization .And other schools, like EMU, seek links
between women's studies and applied areas like public policy and public health.
In keeping with the feminist movement origins of women's studies, I think that
today we have a clear set of goals for our future work. One is to build on lessons of
intersectionality and keep exploring how class, race, and sexuality operate with gender,
for example in access to health care and in shaping income inequality – in the U.S and
across global regions. A second area for development is leadership—training women in
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particular to shape the direction of policy, politics, science, business, and academia. A
third area, close to my own work, is to address sexual assault research agendas on
campus, in wars and within the military, in domestic spaces, and in the workplace.
Finally, I would like to see further curricular revisions to incorporate gender, sexual, and
racial inequality within general education requirements, along with the typically extracurricular sexual violence prevention programs that are now developing.
Before closing I want to return to my personal journey, which I left off in the
1980s after a successful internal appeal that thankfully allowed me to avoid the
extended court battle I had expected. I think the phrase that most accurately captures
my post-tenure case career is that "doing well is the best revenge." It took quite a few
years to recover, especially knowing that some faculty and administrators who had tried
to discredit my work remained influential on campus. Perhaps I felt compelled to
disprove their dire predictions of the dead wood I would soon become, but I think that
gaining secure access to the resources of a research university allowed my work as an
historian and as a feminist to flourish. I have been able to write books on what mattered
most to me: on women's prison reform, on the history of sexuality, including lesbian
history, and most recently on the response to sexual violence in American history.
For seven years I directed the Program in Feminist Studies, and I could not be
more proud of the work our majors, minors, and honors students are doing in the world.
For two decades I taught the introductory course, Feminist Studies 101, which led to my
books No Turning Back and The Essential Feminist Reader. One of my greatest joys
has been my ability to continuing training dozens of graduate students, who have a
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strong grounding in intersectional analysis of race, class, and sexuality, some of whom
have gone on to transform higher education themselves – and I count your former
colleague and program director Dr. Linda Schott among them.
Throughout this journey, I have tried to balance my life to incorporate my
professional identity as an historian with my passion for feminist scholarship, program
building, and social change. I may well still be teaching my classes on "The Feminist
Critique" and "The History of Sexual Violence" into the 2020s. It will be a great privilege
if I'm able to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my entry into women's studies in a world
that values this enterprise as much as all of you do.
Thank you.
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