They wanted to signal, back in 1981, that the new interdisciplinary program wouldn't be just about women. So they named it the Program in Feminist Studies -- the first in the country with that title.
"We saw our mission as reaching out to all students, male and female," history professor Estelle Freedman explains. "We wanted to look at the relationship of sex and gender to broader questions of society and politics, including racial and other inequalities and movements for social justice."
This year, the program celebrated its 20th birthday. To help cut the cake, some of its more than 100 graduates returned in June for a daylong celebration and symposium about feminism and the arts, politics and public service. Panelists included Laura Kay, '81, an associate professor of astronomy and women's studies at Barnard College; documentary filmmaker Dayna Goldfine, '81, whose credits include Frosh and Now & Then; Ana Matosantos, '97, a health policy analyst with the California legislature; Stephanie Poggi, '82, former editor of Gay Community News and Sojourner; and Masum Momaya, '99, a consultant on social-justice issues for foundations and nonprofit businesses. The symposium also marked a changing of the guard, as Freedman stepped down from the program she helped launch and linguistics professor Penny Eckert became its eighth director.
Freedman, a specialist in U.S. social history and women's history, is wrapping up 13 years of teaching Feminist Studies 101 with a new book, No Turning Back: The Historical Case for Feminism, due in spring 2002. Aimed at a general readership, the book is informed by students' feedback over the years, and it reflects how feminist studies has broadened from its initial focus on US history to become a multidisciplinary, global field. "It's about why feminism emerges when it does and the different shapes it has taken," Freedman says. "After all, there have been a variety of feminisms since the 18th and 19th centuries -- liberal, socialist, anarcha, lesbian, Christian, Asian-American, African-American, Jewish. There's no one feminism."
Incoming director Eckert, a sociolinguist who has studied disappearing peasant dialects in the Pyrenees and polarized groups of teenage students in Detroit (which she dubbed "jocks" and "burnouts"), is crossing the final Ts on her own new book, Language and Gender Practice. She says some students in her feminist studies course are glad to be there, but others are resentful because they are only taking the class to fulfill the University's gender studies requirement: "They tend to think one of two things -- either that feminism has happened and they want to get on with things, or that they're going to hear in class what they've heard all their lives."
The continuing challenge, Eckert says, is to get students to look past their preconceived notions of feminism and see its constant evolution. "They dismiss it, and we're asking them not to dismiss it."
