All posts by lizhibbard@gmail.com

Alice Kessler-Harris, Historical Context

“How could you be a feminist and yet be writing an objective history?”

Video

ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS

R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower
IRWGS Core Faculty

In the early 1960s when I was still in graduate school I got involved with what was then an SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society project, a community organizing project. I think I was already pregnant at the time, in graduate school, and commuting and all that. So I was never deeply into it, but it certainly helped to shate my identity as an engaged historian. At the same time, I should note that historians in general looked down their noses at such activity. Presentism was what it was called, or relevant history. It was a dirty word. You couldn’t ask questions that grew out of the present situation. Our questions had to come out of some theoretically objective past. Women’s studies for me was a sort of release. Among other things it enabled me, along with others, to fight this notion of presentism being a bad thing. In the early 1970s there were struggles about whether a feminist history was not in and of itself a biased history and therefore not objective. “How could you be a feminist, doing history as a feminist, and yet be writing an objective history?” was the question.

Well, that’s background to your question because in the early part of the ‘70s—I guess it was ‘74, ‘75—I went off to Sarah Lawrence to work with Gerda Lerner at setting up the women’s history program there. I realized when I was there that the opportunity to work with the trade union movement, which came along at that time, was really the flip side of my interest in women—I was working on a book on women’s work, and I was into women’s history, but where was the labor background that I had begun with? After two years at Sarah Lawrence, I went to work for a trade union, District 65 of what’s now the United Auto Workers. It was then a Distributive Workers of America Local. Together with Bert Silverman and Murray Yanowitch, who had conceived the program, we worked at setting it up. My particular job was to be the onsite director of the program. The trade union had agreed to negotiate release time for the workers who came to classes at the union headquarters in lower Manhattan. We offered a bachelor’s degree sponsored by Hofstra University. We’d got special permission from the state to set up an off campus site. Most of the faculty were Hofstra faculty who taught in the union headquarters and we, the leaders of the program, were invited to sit in on the union’s executive committee meetings. We were very much in and part of the union structure, even as we remained, in some sense, people with academic heads. Negotiating, what you might call the community, the trade union and the university, was inevitably fraught. We found ourselves thinking about how we valued education and how to impart it to a non-traditional community. At the same time we recognized how much that community had to teach us and therefore struggled with how to involve it in the educational process. I have to say that that was one of the formative experiences of both my academic and my intellectual life.

Gillian Lindt, Historical Context

“…it was invariably “the men” and “the girls.”

Audio

GILLIAN LINDT

Professor Emeritus of of Religion
Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1984 – 89

 
The real reason I think that there was pressure then to admit women to Columbia College came not so much from faculty but from the administration. Columbia College was becoming less and less competitive, because young men didn’t want to go to an all—I mean, we were the last of the Ivies, by far, to become coed. That was the real pressure. So then they formed this committee, and I have really no idea why I was put on it. At that point, yes, I was chair of a department and I had taught at Columbia College, I had taught graduate students, and I certainly was for it, but it wasn’t until I was on that committee that I discovered just how—I think I can use the term—prejudiced some of my colleagues were. I remember for instance one of them saying…in a committee meeting, even said, “Well, now that we have an all Columbia College, men can live in a dorm, we need a girl”—it was men, they said, men—“we need a girl for every man.” Now, okay, it’s a joke, right, but it’s not something that you would say in an official meeting.

Then there was one very distinguished member who he then was for it, but he wanted a quota, because he said, “Well, there may be a lot of smart women, so maybe we should limit it to fifteen percent.” Then they talked fifty. Then someone would just say, wait a minute, you can’t do that, that’s outlawed. But it was those things that made me then realize how old fashioned. In fact, that’s right, I was the only one. I tried to get them to change. I spent a lot of time, when we used to have the minutes, changing language in the report because the person who was taking it just took down what was said, and it was invariably “the men” and “the girls.” Well, it’s a small thing, right? It just suggests they’re unequal…We were asked to edit it, and the person who was chair of the committee absolutely agreed with me. I tried at various points to tell them, because I was so shocked by all this. They then wanted—because they suddenly realized, hey, this is it. Our report I think came out in April. It was at the end of the term, and we had a faculty meeting. I tried to persuade them that we shouldn’t admit women that fall, we should wait a full year. I felt very strongly that we needed to gather administrative resources, we needed to have assistant dean of students, we need to have faculty who were made more aware of the ways in which you need to change some of the attitudes if you’re going to have women and treat them as equals, but nobody wanted to listen.

So finally I wrote a minority report. It was very short, I think it was one paragraph, in which I basically said I supported the committee in everything except I thought we should wait another year because we needed a year to really make the university, and especially Columbia College, really be able to build the resources so that women would be really welcomed as equals. I still remember the then associate dean of the college coming to me as I went to the faculty meeting, and he said, “Gill, I hope you are aware that you’re not actually a member of the faculty of Columbia College.” Well, I wasn’t aware. It happened, in those days, you see, you were appointed to different colleges, and I’d been appointed to the graduate school. My chair had simply forgotten to nominate me. I had taught undergraduates. I mean, I almost had to laugh, because I said, “Look, I want to make the report.” My vote, with a faculty of five hundred, that doesn’t matter. But again, they were so scared of this, and it was so silly. In fact the majority voted for doing it right away, but without my having any idea the provost and the president decided it was better to wait a year.

Early Challenges, Sarah Chinn

“No one ever questioned the fact that I wanted to do feminist oriented work…”

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SARAH CHINN

Professor of English, Hunter College

In fact, I remember I was there when this New York Times Magazine article about Carolyn Heilbrun came out, and I was part of a group of graduate students that wrote a letter saying, “This [experiencing outright institutional hostility towards our feminist scholarship] is not our experience. This is not true for us.” Were they like super, super supportive in strategic ways? No. But Anne McClintock, Ann Douglas, Priscilla Wald. I don’t think Gauri [Viswanathan] was there yet. Even the male faculty, John Archer, like all these people, were incredibly supportive of feminist work. No one ever questioned the fact that I wanted to do feminist oriented work, no one, and I was supported and encouraged in it. So, no, I never, never felt that. Quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. I felt like other people may have had that experience, and it certainly happened on the faculty level where women did not get tenure nearly as much as men did, absolutely, and you could see it institutionally. Within our department, on the day-to-day basis, not at all, and I never felt as a woman that somehow I was less important or I should be less listened to. I was very, in fact, involved in and very active in the life of the department. I was our department representative to the Graduate Student Council, I did this newsletter, I was really involved, and I never ever felt any of that.

Q: It’s predominantly the faculty that were experiencing that.

Yes, absolutely, because they had to deal with the upper administration, which was an old boys club. But in our department, I think because our program was so big—there were thirty of us per year, so there was a huge amount of variety—but also I think there were enough people both on the faculty and among the student body who were just like, I don’t understand why being a feminist is a deal. Do you know what I mean? That was just like, I came in a fully-formed feminist. Obviously I had a lot to learn, but my political sense of self was formed. I never was closeted on my CV, because it’s like, look, this is the work I do, this is who I am, either you want me or you don’t.

So yes, I’m sorry, but I understand it was an institutional truth for many, particularly the older women faculty who had really got screwed over. It’s just a total sea change, and I thank our feminist foremothers for it, because we could not have done it. We absolutely are standing on their shoulders. They had to take a huge amount of shit so I could live this life, and I’m totally appreciative of it, absolutely.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Shamus Khan

“…the logic of response would have been very different”

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SHAMUS KHAN

Associate Professor of Sociology

I absolutely think that the filing of a complaint has meant that the structure of response to gender-based misconduct and sexual assault on campus, overall, has been one of legal compliance to the law rather than systems of justice. Broader systems of justice. So, conceptualizing victim’s justice, for example, which may be less punitive to people who’ve been accused. It may have a very different form. I don’t know that the students were wrong to file the complaint because I don’t know that they would’ve gotten as much attention or institutional response had they not filed the complaint. I also think that it’s important to recall that we’re being led by the president of this university, who is a lawyer. I think in many ways, his response may have been this anyway because a legal framework is the framework that he’s most likely to fall back upon.

My assessment, in thinking that it’s correct that we’re pretty bound, now, to a legal interpretation of Title IX and gender-based misconduct, is that it’s not necessarily the case that the reason for that is the filing of the complaint, although I certainly think it contributed to it. I think alternate things that could have happened would be, for example, imagine if instead of now being run by lawyers—I think the university hired nine lawyers to be investigative and response units to these things—they hired a team of community organizers, psychologists, social workers to respond. I think that then, the logic of response would have been very different. It would have been less about adherence to the law and making sure that our response is consistent with both the requirements of Title IX and the vision articulated within the “Dear Colleague” letter of the Department of Education, the Office of Civil Rights. Instead, could have included all kinds of understandings tied to psychological services for victims and for perpetrators, tied to community-based models of justice.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Lila Abu-Lughod

“This is a political history…”

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LILA ABU-LUGHOD

Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science
IRWGS Core Faculty
IRWGS Director, 2004-07

I think our motivation for getting this oral history project is to document how we did our work because this needed to be done here. We’re all in it for a much more political reason and we want that documented…the story we want to tell is the story of how we built this gender institute and kept it a good place and what kind of difference we were trying to make at Columbia. That’s the story we wanted to tell that should be documented because that might all get lost. It’s all, “I remember that Jean [Howard] said this and they did that.”

We want to tell the story of this political history of people who are committed to a certain project and work together to make that happen. It’s also intellectual, but it’s not personal. It is gratifying. These are people I really love and respect, and, of course, because it’s so collegial and such a rare collegial space here, I love that. I cherish that. It is personally meaningful that I go into the room and everybody who walks in, I feel happy to see them. You don’t feel that way everywhere you go. Everybody has goodwill and good faith towards it. That’s rare but partly, I think, because we’re not competing for any resources and there’s a political project as there is a problem—when we have all white men running this institution that we all live in and we know the women’s salaries are lower and we know the women never get to be on Riverside Drive [indicating preferred faculty housing], they get housing elsewhere. You see the inequalities so we’ve got to do something about that, as well as intellectual work of really building a scholarly field and working in it.

Core Faculty, Intellectual Spaces, Interdisciplinary Leadership, IRWAG to IRWGS, Marianne Hirsch

“…students are pushing against the limits of the curriculum”

Video

MARIANNE HIRSCH

Professor of English and Comparative Literature
IRWGS Core Faculty
Director of IRWGS, 2007-08, 2015

Well, the field is changing. Students are changing and I think the curriculum is changing as well. I mean, the biggest shift, curricularly, is that we’ve added “Sexuality” to our name. I think we’ve always been doing sexuality and we are the place at Columbia, certainly in Arts & Sciences, that’s doing sexuality. We’ve been trying to appoint a faculty member in that field, but short of that, we have a number of people who teach it and who have come forward and been willing to teach it. I think that move towards sexuality has been a very big one. The global focus is getting more urgent. I think it already was when I first arrived here and at Columbia. IRWGS appointed Lila Abu-Lughod and Beth Povinelli, so they’ve brought that in and Roz Morris was the director when I first was hired. I think we’ve had that very much at the forefront of our mission, but it takes constant care to maintain it and to enlarge it. We’ve tried to appoint somebody in Latin American Studies, for example. That didn’t succeed but we’re hoping to do, again, this constant vigilance to try to have course offerings that are broad in that way. That’s been some of the shift.

I think what I’ve seen also is a shift in student culture. I feel like recently, really, in the last two or three years, students are just more activist. Changing things in the world seems more urgent to them. I think the kinds of sophistication about analyses of issues of social difference has just been so much more at the forefront of students’ thinking, both undergraduate and graduate. That’s been a shift from the first decade of this century when I think fighting the war was a big issue, and then the economic depression, I think, made all of us more discouraged and probably students more quiescent.

We’re doing this interview on the heels of the protests in Baltimore, so I think we’re seeing something erupt that has been building and it has to do with just tremendous economic inequalities. I’d like to think that students are beginning to realize what it costs their parents for them to be getting this education and to take a look at what that privilege means and who is excluded from it. I think that’s part of it. In terms of gender and sexuality, I think just this larger conversation that’s been taking place in the US that comes out of the gay marriage debate––I think the country’s become so polarized around every question that students are being drawn into some of these questions, whether they want to or not.

I don’t think it’s because the curriculum has changed. I think that students are pushing against the limits of the curriculum, which has not necessarily changed. At the same time, there are a lot of initiatives that are beginning at Columbia, for example, the Justice Initiative and teaching in prisons. I mean, that’s kind of new here and the opportunities to do more of that, more work with the community, public humanities––I think those spaces are opening up and I think students are seeing those opportunities.

Early Challenges, Founding, Jean Howard

“…the English Department was a place that was looking to the past, not the future.”

Video

JEAN HOWARD

George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities
IRWGS Director, 1997-99

Well, I came to the Columbia English department, and I was shocked. It was a very hard transition in—I had imagined something that just wasn’t true. It was a place that was looking to the past, not the future. It was very male-dominated. I just wasn’t ready, having been at Syracuse for thirteen years where there were almost as many women on the faculty as men, it was very egalitarian, it was very democratic. We did everything by votes. Everything was written down, it was transparent. I got here and I couldn’t figure out how the English department worked. It seemed to work by a handful of older men making decisions. I think that’s actually how it did work. Of course, nobody really was getting tenure from below at that point, and so there was a huge divide between the junior and the senior faculty, and lots of misunderstanding, lots of suspicion. There were just so few women.

I was just always very self-conscious because you were always aware of your difference. I had a very small office on this floor, this lovely office I’m in now belonged to Ted Tayler, and I was in a very small one. But there were all men on this floor, and so you’d walk out and there would be this sea of men talking. You’d walk by, and they’d go silent. And I’m not making this up: a decade after I first came here, Fran Dolan was a visitor when I was at Penn, and she had the same experience. She’d walk out of the office and then all the men would fall silent. And it’s just––you felt like you stuck out. People were not mean to me or anything. There were many friendly people, colleagues. But the whole atmosphere was so charged with maleness that it was very hard, as a senior woman, to feel that you were really integrated.

Then, I found the gender institute very quickly. The first year I came, I was put on a committee, because there weren’t that many senior women, to choose the first head of the gender institute—not the first, the second. Carolyn Heilbrun had fought to have a gender institute set up at Columbia, and she had won that, and they’d given her a room, and that’s about as far as she got.

Then we were getting the first formal director and I was on that committee. Carolyn Bynum chaired that committee. She was new at Columbia. That’s the search that brought us Martha Howell, eventually, who became the first director. So in my second year here, I was working with Martha right away. She was in the early modern period in history. She’s a lovely, smart woman. And I began to help create the courses and create the curriculum and all the things that had to be done, and that was a glorious community. I had that as a very active, intellectual and also social space. That was my other [way of] coping. Then I had my family, and I had lots of friends in the discipline, so I wasn’t stuck in the English department for everything. But I tell you, the English department did not nurture me in that first decade. It was a very hard environment.

The English department I live in today is a fabulous department. I’m very happy in this department. I was not happy in the ’90s.

Early Challenges, Joan Ferrante

“We did have women but they didn’t stay.”

Audio

JOAN FERRANTE

Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature

Nina Auerbach, Carolyn Burke, Barbara Christian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kate Ellis, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Green, Alice Jardine, Myra Jehlen, Constance Jordan, Alice Kaplan, Kate Millet, Nancy Milford, Nancy Miller, Lillian Robinson, Naomi Schor, Catharine Stimpson, Susan Suleiman, and Louise Yelin. Many of whom have had stellar careers. They were all here, and could have stayed. Imagine if even a few of them had stayed, the difference it would have made, actually, even in the prestige of the English and French departments, which didn’t have many people of that stature, at least not very many.

Susan Winnett, whose departure caused Carol [Carolyn Heilbrun] to leave, she did something like sixty MA essays in one year, because students so much wanted to work with her, and she worked very hard at it, and she did very well with them. PhD students who wanted to write on women’s studies found ways to provide for themselves. Eventually, they would somehow cobble together a committee for the dissertation that could work. If you get at least one person on there who knows something about the field, then the others sort of fill in. There wasn’t a really solid structure. I think things are much better now there. Of course, Jean [Howard] came, and Margie Ferguson came first, before Jean. That was a great boon, but she didn’t stay. Carol Kay was the partner of Jonathan Arac. She was here for a while. We did have women, but they didn’t stay.

Intellectual Spaces, Laura Ciolkowski

“You can’t study gender in isolation from race, or class, or ethnicity…”

Audio

LAURA CIOLKOWSKI

Associate Director of IRWGS
Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference
Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

The audience [of the Center for the Study of Social Difference] has always been other faculty, but we’re always interested in expanding that, which is why we launched this blog [Social Difference Online] this past fall. Now that we’ve been taken under the wing of university development, we’re doing a lot more for trustees and alums. There’s a much broader reach at this point. It’s continuing to broaden. That’s a good thing. We have multiple audiences, so that’s a little bit challenging too. Learning how to pitch your research to different constituencies has been a kind of interesting but worthwhile thing. I feel like one should always be able to explain what one is thinking and doing. That’s almost a no-brainer, right? We should never only be talking to other academics. We should all be public intellectuals to some degree. That’s kind of what we’re aiming for.

Part of the competing vision of the center is reflected in the makeup of the working groups. If the vision is strictly an advanced study center, then there’s not a whole lot of artists and activists. It’s more focused on getting together and workshopping papers and discussing things. If the model is more capacious, or more about disseminating ideas and also pushing the boundaries of research and so forth, then you have a project like Women Mobilizing Memory, archives, other projects that are specifically interested in performance, and activism and other things, and do a lot of public programming. That was a big point of contention actually. Do we want to do any public programming? Do we want to do none? Because that takes up time and energy.

The whole idea of the center is to—we were just talking about intersectionality before—it’s really, kind of an outgrowth of that, that one can’t study gender only. You can’t study gender in isolation from race, or class, or ethnicity. It doesn’t make any sense. Certainly if you think about where gender and sexuality studies is going right now, that’s also a no-brainer. Nobody does that. That’s the starting point for pretty much everyone. Our feeling was that obviously IRWGS is immensely relevant and we do really important work, but that we needed something, some other thing, that could pull together the kinds of research, the kinds of work, and the endeavors that go on in these other centers and institutes that otherwise wouldn’t really connect somehow. So the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Institute for Research in African American Studies—the whole litany of everybody [IRWGS, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society]—and that the center would be the place where you wouldn’t have to worry about these kind of disciplinary boundaries. You wouldn’t have to constantly try to make the argument that when one studies gender, one has to think about race, and ethnicity, and class, and all this other stuff. The center is that. I don’t think it could be any other way. The idea is that we’re trying to do something unique in some ways because the way the university is organized, it’s really hard to initiate a working group or research project that addresses these kinds of issues. Where would it go? I’m not sure. It doesn’t fit anywhere and that’s the problem that CSSD was designed to address.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Patricia Dailey

“JFAB: it’s there to advocate for junior faculty…”

Video

PATRICIA DAILEY

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
IRWGS Director, 2014

Basically [the Junior Faculty Advisory Board, JFAB] is there to advocate for junior faculty directly to the administration, and create a sense of solidarity, or be a consulting board too—an advisory board for junior faculty and on behalf of junior faculty. I’m happy to say that its mission has changed partially due to the success of a lot of the initiatives. So we wanted a mentoring program, and it was implemented as of the fall. We wanted topping off of prestigious fellowships and grants, and we got that. It’s being implemented for the junior faculty, and even senior faculty, as of this fall [2015]. We wanted more research funds to be dedicated to junior faculty.

Housing and childcare are two banes of our existence. It’s funny, I was just on the phone yesterday with somebody who found out his wife is pregnant with twins, and they’re in a one-bedroom apartment. How does he get a larger apartment? People starting families, not having any place to do—some of them not having offices—this is a person also who doesn’t even have his own office: How are junior faculty expected to meet our expectations of them? These are things that have little to do with gender, but just have everything to do with seniority and the structure here. Sometimes they have to do with gender in other ways, especially given childcare and the burdens of childcare, or family care for elderly parents, and how often that falls on women, statistically. It’s, sadly, still a norm.

Junior faculty take on an incredible burden in terms of service. Their warm bodies are used in ways that often some senior faculty members’ aren’t, because they have the privilege of being able to opt out at times. We had already had this discussion as a committee before. Suddenly [one administrator] says, “Oh, well, maybe we should change Manhattanville to have more junior faculty housing then.” I said, “Yes. While you’re at it, get the infant care center at the ground floor.” I’m trying to get them [people in the provost’s office] to think in these broader terms that will actually—and, like the school district. Do you realize that the junior faculty might not want to move up there because of the school district, District Five, which is not the best of options for public schools? Now you’re putting the burden on them if they don’t want the public schools, then, to go into private schools. The private school tuition benefit that they provide hasn’t been updated since the ‘80s. It’s just a real financial disaster.