Feminist reflections on university activism through women's studies at a State University: Narratives of promise, compromise, and powerlessness

Frontiers

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 38-60

  Shircliffe, Barbara J ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0034361492     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3347109     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. At the request of a few informants, I have used pseudonyms. All other references are not pseudonyms. The interviews were conducted between March 1995 and March 1996.
2. This article is based on research for my dissertation, which documents the efforts of feminist students and professors to develop a radical education practice in academe through the creation of a women's studies program. While conducting the research, I was a doctoral candidate in Social Foundations of Education at U.B. Having earned a master's degree in American Studies at U.B., the program in which women's studies is located, I was familiar with the program's history and had taken classes from several of the women's studies professors. As part of a larger study, the process of gathering data through oral histories and archival research took close to two years. Fortunately, over the years, those who have been involved in the program donated to the university archives a large number of documents such as meeting minutes, course catalogs, and syllabi, and correspondence with the administration and community and national organizations. Through these documents and contacts with current women's studies professors, I identified seventy former student leaders, professors, and key administrators to whom I sent letters requesting interviews. Ultimately, I interviewed twenty-six former students, instructors, and professors directly involved in women's studies, as well as one key administrator, the then-chair of American Studies, and one male and one female student activist. The interviews, two to five hours in length, were tape-recorded. I conducted most interviews in person, though some were done over the telephone with subjects as far away as Chile. Follow-up interviews were conducted with several of the women where geographical location and time permitted.
3. Of twenty-six former women's studies students, instructors, and professors participating in this history, twenty-one are white, three are African American, one is Middle Eastern, and one is South American. Sixteen began their involvement in women's studies as undergraduate and graduate students in the 1970s, and two began as students in the 1980s. Five were professors when they first became active, and one was the spouse of a professor at the university. Two were working as staff members at the university in nonacademic positions.
4. See Catherine R. Stimpson with Nina K. Cobb, Women's Studies in the United States (New York: Ford Foundation, 1986); and Beverly Guy-Sheftall with Susan Heath, Women's Studies: A Retrospective: A Report to the Ford Foundation (New York: Ford Foundation, 1995).
5. See Catherine R. Stimpson with Nina K. Cobb, Women's Studies in the United States (New York: Ford Foundation, 1986); and Beverly Guy-Sheftall with Susan Heath, Women's Studies: A Retrospective: A Report to the Ford Foundation (New York: Ford Foundation, 1995).
6. Mariam K. Chamberlain, ed., Women in Academe: Progress and Prospects (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 137.
7. Stimpson and Cobb, Women's Studies in the United States, 21.
8. Caryn McTighe Musil and Ruby Sales, "Funding Women's Studies," in Transforming the Curriculum: Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies, ed. Johnnella E. Butler and John C. Walter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 23.
9. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
10. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
11. Musil and Sales, "Funding Women's Studies," 23.
12. Christine Grahl et al., "Women's Studies: A Case in Point," Feminist Studies 1:2 (1972): 109-20.
13. As Barbara Winkler suggests, women's studies founders' vision for institution building reflected the "prefigurative politics" that dominated the youthful branches of the Civil Rights and the New Left movements. Sociologist Wini Breines, who coined this term, describes "prefigurative politics" as the desire to "create and sustain within the lived practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that 'prefigured' and embodied the desired society." See Barbara Winkler, "A Comparative History of Four Women's Studies Programs" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1992); and Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), 6.
14. As Barbara Winkler suggests, women's studies founders' vision for institution building reflected the "prefigurative politics" that dominated the youthful branches of the Civil Rights and the New Left movements. Sociologist Wini Breines, who coined this term, describes "prefigurative politics" as the desire to "create and sustain within the lived practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that 'prefigured' and embodied the desired society." See Barbara Winkler, "A Comparative History of Four Women's Studies Programs" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1992); and Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982), 6.
15. "Options and Proposals for Staff for Fall 1976," Governance Minutes, April 14, 1976, Women's Studies College Records, SUNY at Buffalo Archives.