Reflections on a Half Century of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

This issue marks an important milestone in feminist scholarship and history – the fiftieth year of publication of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

When I founded this journal in 1972, feminist scholarship was not established as a legitimate field of inquiry, and colleges and universities did not yet have formal Women’s Studies courses or Women’s Studies programs; all disciplines were highly masculinist. Indeed, when I was a graduate student in the 1960s, American Literature courses rarely included the work of women writers. The now canonical American women writers like Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Zora Neal Hurston, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, and many others were not part of the curriculum. American women writers were simply not part of the conversation.

In early May 1970, when I was a new Assistant Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Queens College, C.U.N.Y, I attended the Congress to Unite Women which was held at the Intermediate School on West 17th Street, very near where I lived on West 19th Street in Manhattan. As a young professional at a time when most women were not encouraged to have serious careers, I was used to being one of the few, and often the only woman, in the room with male colleagues, so it was an extraordinary revelation to find an auditorium full of women professionals – women for whom work was a powerful commitment – at this conference. In addition to professors, there were architects, lawyers, financial analysts, internists, surgeons, psychiatrists, and other medical specialists. engineers, scientists, financial analysts, journalists, editors, writers, visual artists, musicians, and the list goes on and on. To say I was surprised to see that there were so many women for whom work was crucial to their core identity is actually an understatement: this conference changed my life, and I became a conscious and committed feminist.

Inspired and energized by the impact of the Congress to Unite Women, I decided to reread many of the American novels that I had read as a graduate student to see what I might discover about the representation of women in these texts from the Early National Period to the 1960s. I began with Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), the first American novel published by a female author, and I concluded with Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (1965). I was distressed to discover that all of the novels I reread, whether by female or male authors, conveyed basically the same message: inheriting Eve’s legacy, women are fallen creatures and should be punished for any independent actions which are seen as transgressive. Indeed, all of these novels whether by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser or Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Mary McCarthy, or others, conclude with a female protagonist who is either dead or is socially sidelined. For example, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is relegated to the edge of the village; in Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer disappears into an unknown and unknowable future: in The Awakening, Edna Pontellier drowns; in the House of Mirth, Lilly Bart dies of an overdose of chloral commonly used as sleeping medication in the nineteenth century; in Sister Carrie, Carrie Meeber endlessly rocks in her chair; in The Company She Keeps, the protagonist realizes that she has been trying to find herself through others “borrowing their feelings, as the moon borrowed light. She herself was a dead planet.”

This research led to me to write an essay, “Seduced and Abandoned in the New World: The Fallen Woman in American Fiction,” which was published in Woman in Sexist Society, ed. Gornick and Moran, Basic Books, 1970, and is now considered a foundational work in feminist criticism. This essay concludes with observations and questions which are still important today: “ … fiction can contribute to challenging female consciousness and men’s concept of women by providing a vision of a New Eve, of a woman who is self-actualizing, strong, risk-taking. Women like this have existed in real life – consider Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller, Frances Wright, Amelia Bloomer, Amelia Earhart. Why have our novelists persisted in ignoring these examples of strong women, reinforcing instead the image of women as forlorn, helpless creatures who are certain to be destroyed or hopelessly embittered unless they devote themselves exclusively to their domestic lives and duties as wives and mothers? … . Furthermore, why have women internalized cultural concepts of themselves as inferior or potentially evil creatures when their own experience tells them otherwise?” (271–72)

On August 26, 1970, along with an estimated 10,000 people, I took part in a march down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of American Women’s Right to Vote as well as the start of a new “Crusade for Equality.” Excited and energized by the possibilities for feminist research as well as political activism, I designed a course in “The Feminist Movement” that I taught in the Spring 1971 semester. Much to my delight, more than one hundred students enrolled in this course instead of the twenty five I had been expecting. With my modest budget for guest speakers, I invited Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Florence Howe, Kate Millett, Elaine Showalter, Catharine Stimpson, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Alex Kates Shulman, and other prominent feminists in the New York metropolitan area to talk with my students about feminism. This course was wildly successful and was the subject of articles in the New York Post and other newspapers.

In an effort to better understand the evolution of feminism, I decided to undertake a research project to compile a collection of important documents that chronicle the origins of the Feminist Movement which emphasized women’s enfranchisement and its evolution into the Second Wave of Feminism with its focus on equal legal and social rights for women. This collection became The American Sisterhood: Writings from the Feminist Movement from the Colonial Times to the Present (Harper and Row, 1972) and included work by or about American women from “The First Trial of Anne Hutchinson” (1636), Sarah Grimke, “Legal disabilities of Women,” (1837), the Seneca Falls Convention, “Declarations, Sentiments and Resolutions,” (1848) to Robin Morgan, ”Goodbye to All That,” (1970), Gloria Steinem, “What It Would Be Like if Women Win” (1970), Florence Howe, “The Education of Women,” (1970), and the Lower East Side Women’s Liberation Collective, “Love is Just a Four Letter Word,” (1971).

In 1971, as I was becoming more and more actively engaged in feminist scholarship and politics, I was asked by the only woman on the editorial board of Gordon and Breach, a publisher of scientific journals, if I might be interested in founding and editing a journal of feminist scholarship which did not exist at the time: I welcomed the opportunity to embark on this adventure. After much consultation with the community of feminist scholars, we decided that Women’s Studies; An Interdisciplinary Journal would be the most effective title; it was extremely important to me that the journal have an interdisciplinary range because it was, and still is, important to encourage feminist work in a wide a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences and sciences. The first issue of the journal was published in 1972.

When I told the Chair of my English Department that I was undertaking the project to establish and edit Women’s Studies, he slammed the door of his office shut, ripped his leather belt off, folded it in three parts and began hitting the desk with the folded belt and shouting over and over again: “We hired you to teach American Literature not Women’s Studies!” The concept of harassment was not yet a recognized phenomenon, and I held my breath in fear of what the Department Chair might do next. When his anger was finally exhausted, I left his office shaken, but not daunted.

The next day when I arrived on campus and went to the Department mail room, there was a notice in every mailbox announcing the “founding of a new scholarly journal – Male Studies.” This new journal would “require proof of genitalia” with submission of the manuscript.

Fortunately, soon after Women’s Studies was first published in 1972, the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement, often referred to as The Women’s Liberation Movement, was gaining substantial traction nation-wide, and Manhattan was the epicenter. And in 1972, the Second Congress to Unite Women took place in the same school on West 17th Street in Manhattan, and I eagerly attended. By then, there were many feminist Consciousness Raising Groups as well as activist groups like Red Stockings, Lavender Menace, in addition to the National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) There were also feminist scholarship study groups in universities like Columbia, NYU, Rutgers as well as C.U.N.Y. Slogans like ‘‘Sisterhood is Powerful,” “The Personal is Political,” and “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” were widely heard; when hostile critics accused feminists of man-hating, the response was rapid and succinct: “Feminism is the belief in the social, political and economic equality of women.”

In my “Editorial: Why Women’s Studies” in the first issue of Vol 1 of the Journal in 1972, I put forth the reasons for founding the journal:

“Since the university mirrors larger social structure, teaching and scholarship often reinforce male dominance, and academic disciplines such as history, literary criticism, psychology, political science and even anthropology, sociology and biology become bastions of male supremacy. Although sexism in academia is often unconscious, it is important to understand that the university, along with other major institutions, is often hostile to women.

In spite of, or perhaps, because of, this hostility, feminist thought and scholarship are rapidly advancing. The conviction that men and women should have equal political, economic, and social rights, which constitutes the core of feminism, makes it obvious that extensive research into past beliefs and practices as well as considerable rethinking of our present values is necessary in order to reverse the effects of male chauvinism and the internalization of patriarchal values by women.

Women’s Studies has been founded to provide a forum to discuss and explore the implications of feminism for scholarship and art, to chronicle changing consciousness, and finally to help to create a more equalitarian society.

Women’s Studies does not intend to perpetuate a separate culture for women, nor does it intend to isolate women from the academic and artistic communities; rather, the journal is founded on the premise that careful and disciplined research illuminated by a feminist perspective by both women and men can contribute to effective social change.”¹

A half century later, I am pleased to say that we have made huge progress in regard to achieving the goals of feminism; this said, there is much work left to do!

Notes

¹ Women's Studies, vol. 1, 1972, pp. 1–2.