25 Years of Struggle and Achievement Remembered

The Office of Women Studies, 1980-1996

section written by Marlene Longenecker
Marlene Longenecker, currently a faculty member in OSU's Department of English, ran the Center for six years, and remembers "her poets" and a time when anything could be "politically correct"-even potato chips!

Marlene Longenecker, Director, 1980-1986

Women's Studies Gets a Home

The first thing I discovered when I took up my job as the Director of the new Center for Women's Studies in the fall of 1980 was that our offices had no doors. We had moved from the basement of Derby Hall to remodeled offices in Dulles Hall, but they weren't finished.

For several weeks, we had to lock up all the phones and the typewriters (this was before anyone had computers) in a closet every night and hope that our colleagues in the History Department (who were, I think it is fair to say, apprehensive about our presence among them) had too much to do to bother stealing the office supplies. During the day, the construction workers came and measured, hammered and nailed, sanded and painted, while we met students, or planned staff meetings, or edited the newsletter in the halls.

I worried about this. I had, at a series of meetings the year before, been one of the most outspoken in favor of our difficult decision whether to join the College of Humanities. I thought then (and I think now) that it was a crucial move for Women's Studies.

No one in the University in 1980 was wild to have us. But the men (and they were all men, Phyllis Newman and the late Marilyn Waldman excepted) who ran the College of Humanities — the Dean, Dieter Haenicke, his staff, and the Chairs of the other departments — were less uneasy than most. (And here I must give a special word of appreciation for Charles Babcock, then chair of Classics but also once Dean of the College, and Julian Markels, my own chair in English, whose influential and unfailing support was vital in those early years.)

These men understood interdisciplinarity; they were (more or less) comfortable with the ideological; they were comparatively open to feminism; and, perhaps most important, Black Studies was there before us — a significant, if sometimes ambivalent, ally, without whom we could not have prospered.

I have since learned that construction projects involving College of Humanities space virtually never start or finish on time, but at the time I was a tad concerned that this unlooked-for absence of security was, well, a "test," a special form of initiation just for us. Jokes about a room of one's own (or the lack thereof) flourished. But, in fact, we had a great beginning.

After attending many meetings of the Program Administrators' Caucus of the NWSA, I began to understand how crucial the work of my predecessors had been. I inherited the results of nearly ten years' work by feminists throughout the University and the community. The most important things had been done.

• Barbara Rigney, Leila Rupp, Verta Taylor, and their students had invented and argued for the major, and it was now approved and in place.
• Somehow Mary Irene had managed the miracle of a decent budget.
• The newsletter, The Sojourner — which, for an emerging discipline was a vital tool of self-representation and communication to the rest of the University and beyond — was healthy.
• For nearly ten years the librarians had been compiling the foundations of our terrific library collection.
• And, we had faculty and graduate students committed to brilliant teaching and schooling.

It has always been our ability to offer students exciting courses and to introduce to them new and challenging ideas that has made Women's Studies succeed so well. When I began the job that fall, we were offering one section of WS 201 (Introduction to Women's Studies in the Humanities) and one of WS 202 (Introduction to Women's Studies in the Social Sciences) and, later that year, a senior seminar. We had two majors and about fifty students.

But what really got the Dean's attention in those early years was that our enrollment seemed to quadruple every quarter. One year we had a 600 percent increase!

Turning Points

When I started my job, the first thing I did was hire the best person I could think of — Lynn Fauss — to edit the newsletter. The second thing I did was hiring the best person I could find in the University — Suzanne Hyers — to run the office. Both of them turned out to be geniuses at what they do, and genius was what we needed since we had to invent ourselves. They had the imagination that the task required.

The other most important thing I did was to convince Judith Mayne (Department of French and Italian) to take a joint appointment in Women's Studies. Judith's contributions in every way have been and continue to be invaluable, and I think that magical team in the early years -- which included Barbara, Leila, and Verta -- was the key to the future we now have achieved.

The Spring of 1981 was the turning point for us. We piled everyone we could find into vans and cars to go to the annual National Women's Studies Association meeting at Storrs, Connecticut. The theme was "Women Respond to Racism." Much has been written about this conference in histories of Women's Studies, and much remains to be said, but it played a huge role in the history of our program.

The Connecticut NWSA conference taught us much of what we would now call multiculturalism, even postmodernism; it made us aware of our whiteness (we were very white; Susan Hartmann gets the credit for changing that) in ways we had not really been. We came home and completely overhauled our curriculum so that every course was required to address issues of race as well as gender, however naively we may have incorporated the issue.

Other issues, such as "class" and "sexuality" were present as well, though in a less organized way. When The Lantern, the student newspaper, attacked us for our use of the term "heterosexism" — they thought we had invented it — our commitment to articulate more clearly a feminism based on multiple identities and categories of analysis was renewed. Today such ideas seem commonplace, but they were still new and confusing then.

"Smash bicoastal arrogance": The 1983 NWSA Conference

The NWSA Conference also changed our lives in more practical ways, since among others we came home having promised to host the 1983 Conference here at Ohio State. Thinking about writing this history, I pulled out the Conference Program for NWSA 1983 and the first thing in it is a picture of all of us (photographed by Lucretia Knapp, another "pioneer" in the program) taken with two cows, Paula and Millie. There we all are smiling in front of OSU's swine barn, flanked by two baffled but very large bovines.

We were determined to play up our cowtown image; "smash bicoastal arrogance" was the unofficial theme of the conference (there are still T-shirts with that slogan on them, next to a cow and the Columbus skyline, hidden in the drawers of feminists throughout the country). And we did smash bicoastal arrogance.

That conference put OSU's Women's Studies program on the map, rescued NWSA from bankruptcy and administrative failure, and brought together the most amazing gathering of feminist inquiry and energy this campus has ever seen and perhaps ever will.

Two thousand feminists attended the conference. Looking at the program now, I see the names of women who were pioneers then: Evelyn Beck, Gloria Bowles, Charlotte Bunch, Johnella Butler, Miriam Chamberlain, Michelle Cliff, Myra Dinnerstein, Florence Howe, Ruth Hubbard, Paul Lauter, Catherine MacKinnon, Jane Marcus, Peggy McIntosh, Laurel Richardson, Rosemary Reuther, Barbara Smith, Catherine Stimpson, Shelia Tobias, Merle Woo.

Perhaps more important are the names of women who were younger scholars and writers, many unknown and just beginning, who have now become central to feminist work: Carolyn Allen, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Bartky, Mary Kay Blakely, Mary Lynn Broe, Barbara Christian, Louise De Salvo, Irene Diamond, Moira Ferguson, Judith Fetterly, Marilyn Frye, Jewelle Gomez, Sandra Harding, Nicolle Holander (those wonderful cartoons!), E. Ann Kaplan, Patti Lather, Elizabeth Meese, Toni McNaron, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Tania Modleski, Minnie Bruce Pratt, B. Ruby Rich, Judith Roof, Sue Rosser, Joan Scott, Bonnie Spanier, Mab Segrest, Peg Strobel, Emily Toth, Paula Treichler, Bonnie Zimmermann. And plenty more I could add. Among them, two people who were to play a much bigger role in our history: Mary Margaret Fonow and Susan Hartmann.

Then there were my poets. "Mine," because the "Women's Voices" series, funded largely by a grant by the Ohio Humanities Council to whom I shall be forever grateful, was my special project, and I still can't believe I pulled it off (with the usual phenomenal help from Suzanne, who wrote the grant). It was a four-night series featuring E. M. Broner, June Jordan, and Cherrie Moraga, the first night; then Paule Marshall and Marge Piercy; and on perhaps the most amazing night, Margaret Atwood and Nikki Giovanni who, together, had us laughing for days; and finally, a special tribute to May Sarton, who gave one of her last public readings for us on the final night of the conference.

All those people were here, and about 1800 more, and bringing them here was certainly the highlight of my term as Director (as well as the most difficult thing I have ever done). But more importantly, I think, it gave us both local and global credibility, which we have never lost.

Further Developments

In 1984, Terry Moore assumed The Sojourner editorship and graced the Center with style and a special gift of wit, as evidenced in her "Report from Bonzoland" and a later essay, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love TV." She also became our "muse of bad feminist poetry".

The Robin Wiehm Award for the outstanding undergraduate paper was initiated, and as part of our 10th anniversary year celebration, we were inspired by the words of Martha Teichner, Letty Pogrebin, and Maya Angelou.

In the years after the Conference, we suffered plenty of internal struggles and budget cuts. We lost faculty and had to deal with the complexities of massive growing pains. And like most feminists, then and now, we often took ourselves too seriously. But we had a wonderful antidote to that, too.

Lynn Fauss's daughter, Jennie Evanson, used to come to the office after school (we were her daycare center) and often provided a perspective that only a seven-year-old can manage. Once, after a particularly trying day during which, among other things, Cathie Direen (one of our very best TAs) was complaining about all the junk food in the office, Jennie left her a bag of potato chips with a note that these were "politically correct potato chips." We saved the note as a reminder that some of the tests we had to pass in those early years were administered not by the Dean's delayed construction crew, but by ourselves.

Jennie graduated from OSU last Spring, and I think that, more than anything, made me realize what a long time ago it all was. When I left in January of 1986 to work for two years for Governor Dick and First Lady Dagmar Celeste, I knew I was leaving what might just be the most important job I will ever have.

section written by Susan Hartmann
Following Marlene Longenecker, Dr. Susan Hartmann took the role of director for the Center of Women's Studies. She led the Center for six years, until 1992, and has continued as a faculty member in Women's Studies and History at OSU.

Susan Hartmann, Director, 1986-1992

By the end of the 1980s the number of Women's Studies faculty nearly doubled, with new faculty members specializing in women's health, African American women's literature and history, Latin American women, and women and economic development. As Assistant Director, Mary Margaret Fonow contributed to the curriculum with courses on women and work and on women's movements.

In 1988, the Center launched a new national interdisciplinary journal, NWSA Journal, edited by Mary Jo Wagner. The National Women's Studies Association co-sponsored the periodical, and Ohio State remained its editorial home until 1991 when it moved to the University of Maine.

In 1989, the National Women's Studies Association gave the Center its first Special Commendation award for contributions to the field, including creation of the journal, its model curriculum, and the service of its faculty and staff in NWSA governance. The tribute concluded, "As one of the largest and best funded programs in the country, it . . . has used those privileges with a generosity of spirit that has strengthened women's studies programs across the nation."

Further recognition came in 1991, when the Center appeared as the only North American program featured in the book, Women's Studies International.

Public Lectures and Research Grants

As a way of bringing women's studies to the community, strengthening links between the Center and women in Columbus, and showcasing the Ohio State faculty who teach and conduct research about women, the Center started a downtown lecture/luncheon series. Organized by a committee of several community women, the project sponsors a series of three events each year. Lectures have been given by most of the Women's Studies faculty as well as by our associated graduate faculty from such departments as Classics, History, English, Sociology, and Comparative Studies.

With the help of the Critical Difference for Women Program, the Center raised money to establish the Elizabeth D. Gee Fund for Research on Women, named in memory of a Center associate and strong advocate for Women's Studies, and late spouse of former OSU President Gordon Gee, in order to support research on women by faculty and graduate students throughout the university. Each year 5-10 research projects are chosen to receive funding, helping graduate students complete their Ph.D. dissertations and faculty members conduct research necessary for earning tenure and promotion.

The Graduate Program in Women's Studies

One of the most important accomplishments of this time period was the establishment of a master's degree program in Women's Studies. Starting in the 1980s, students began to undertake graduate work in women's studies by earning individualized degrees through the University's Masters of Liberal Studies program. By the fall of 1990, twenty students were enrolled in the M.Lib.St. program with a concentration in Women's Studies.

One of the first of its kind in the United States, OSU approved the M.A. in Women's Studies degree program in 1990, and the Center welcomed its first class of M.A. students in the fall of 1991. With help from the associated graduate faculty — some 40 scholars in departments throughout the university — the graduate program has continued to enroll about 15 new students each year.

Most of the graduate students work as graduate teaching or research assistants, while some receive fellowships through the University. While working as Assistant Director, Mary Margaret created a training and development program for Women's Studies graduate teaching associates.

Another milestone occurred in January 1992, when the Center moved from its cramped windowless space in Dulles Hall to its current rooms overlooking the Oval in University Hall.

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