by Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor, Department of English
On May 10, 2024, three panels of faculty affiliates, former grant fellows, and friends of the Center for the Study of Women in Society participated in our 50th Anniversary Alumni Symposium.
The “Shaping a Feminist Research Center” leadership panel opened the event with stories of what influenced CSWS’s identity as a feminist research center over time. Next, the “Incubating Feminist Futures” special projects panel shared the history and important outcomes of several CSWS research interest groups and initiatives. Finally, the “Envisioning Feminist Futures” alumni panel discussed the long-term impacts of funding feminist research, scholarship, and creative work for UO graduate students and faculty.
A total of 30 panelists responded to questions related to each session’s focus, as well as the “Feminist Futures” 50th anniversary theme. As participants shared stories of how CSWS funding, programming, leadership, and collaborations have impacted their professional and personal lives, several over-arching themes emerged. What follows is a synthesis of these themes in terms of looking inward, outward, and forward.
Looking Inward.
What kind of space is CSWS? What and who has it supported over time?
Interdisciplinary feminist scholarship often is not recognized or validated by traditional departments, so the Center is an intellectual space for us to come together, to share our ideas, and to advance intersectional feminisms across disciplinary divides. We do this through grant funding, special projects, and research interest groups (RIGs) that connect faculty, graduate students, and communities for interdisciplinary inquiry and collaboration. We do this through speakers, symposia, and conferences that bring to campus cutting-edge feminist thinkers and activists from across the disciplines. And we do this through major research initiatives and partnerships that focus on key regional, national, and global issues that impact women and girls, low-income families, minority groups, and more.
Some outcomes of our intellectual community mentioned during the symposium include, among many others, the very first RIG—Reclaiming the Past—which organized talks, conferences, and archival exhibits and led eventually to the UO Medieval Studies Program; numerous research studies, symposia, conferences, and documentaries produced by the Americas RIG; and the incubation and launch of the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies.
CSWS is an intergenerational mentoring space where graduate students make connections with peers and faculty outside of departmental silos and learn by example how to work together to create spaces and programs that serve our needs. “It has struck me today that a lot of the good ideas about what I should do at my own institution have come from here,” said UO alumna Miriam Abelson, a former Jane Grant Dissertation Fellow who is now an associate professor and head of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. “How should I be a colleague? How should I be a feminist pushing back at my institution? How can I mentor junior colleagues? Those ideas came from the folks here and from so many of the initiatives that I took part in, so I’m really grateful for that time and the support from this community.”
CSWS is a space of solidarity where faculty and graduate students who are in but not of the university can find each other. We are a “soft landing” for new faculty to find like-minded colleagues who can help them navigate quagmires in departmental and institutional culture and politics, and we are a collaborative space for “subversive intellectuals” to build needed programs for diverse faculty and graduate students. Whether through informal relationships or long-running programs like the Women of Color Project, we support each other through professional advancement and career challenges, lending our hard-earned wisdom to lift each other up when the institution seems intent on keeping us down.
“It’s very easy to feel deflated when the university works against you—or when society works against you—when you know what you need,” said Ernesto Martínez, associate professor and head of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. “I feel deflated when I think of myself as an individual, but when I think of myself as part of a collective, I feel animated to do something.... I’m interested in the way that we animate each other to be critical of the world but also to think about possibility.”
For five decades, CSWS has been a space of possibility.
Looking Outward.
What impacts has CSWS had on the UO and beyond?
Intersectional gender inequities are embedded in institutions and perpetuate sexism, racism, and other inequities, as aptly demonstrated by CSWS-sponsored research by Joan Acker, Sandi Morgen, and many others over the Center’s history. As such, CSWS has always functioned as an activist space where we call out practices that are unfavorable to women and inequitable for all and advocate for policy changes at local, state, and national levels.
“Joan showed us that you can’t assume that an organization is gender neutral,” said professor, economist, and policy advisor Margaret Hallock, founding director of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics (WMC) and former director of the UO Labor Education and Research Center (LERC). “Sandi was very theoretical, but she always led by asking, What does this mean for women’s lives? She didn’t believe in the public-private split. She thought it was all one and tried to teach us all how to deal with that.”
With partners such as the WMC and LERC, Hallock said, CSWS can mobilize the kinds of resources that are available in a large public research university to highlight the issues that affect women’s lives, especially in the region and state, in order to “move the needle” on policies that impact women, children, and families in all of their diversity.
Examples of direct interventions mentioned during the symposium include an initiative to evaluate the effectiveness of 1996 Welfare-to-Work policies and make recommendations for renewing temporary assistance programs; an initiative in the early 2000s to evaluate classification and compensation in Oregon to alleviate gender-based pay inequities between female-dominated and male-dominated jobs; and a campaign with United Academics to change labor policies at UO that affected caregivers during the 2020 pandemic.
Panelists remembered Acker and Morgen throughout the day as role models for feminist leadership and activism.
“Sandi taught me more than any other single person what a feminist research center could do and should aim to do to make the world a better place,” said historian Ellen Herman, co-director of the Wayne Morse Center.
“Getting to listen and talk about Mrs. Acker today has greatly expanded my love and esteem for her,” said UO alumnus Thomas Beaumont, a former student of Acker’s and a retired professor and clinical social worker at the University of Minnesota. “She meant so much to me.”
For five decades, CSWS has been a space of advocacy and activism.
Looking Forward.
What will intersectional feminisms look like in the 21st century? What can CSWS do to support this work?
CSWS has built a legacy of feminist research, solidarity, community, and activism for present and future generations at the University of Oregon. But as current rollbacks to our civil liberties and social freedoms demonstrate, the work of social justice activism cannot rest. New strategies are needed if we are to create and sustain feminist futures. During the symposium, panelists shared their visions of what this project might look like.
What does it mean to be a feminist or feminist scholar in the 21st century? We are still applying 20th century approaches to issues that are born of entirely different social contexts, with new technologies, new social movements, and new ways of defining gender. So as feminist scholars of an older generation, we need to ask ourselves, How do we embrace this new era? What parts of our feminist legacies do we carry forward, and what parts do we update or set aside to meet the needs of the next five decades? What exactly is feminist research today, and how do we deliver and disseminate that research to meet people beyond our academic silos—to engage students as early as high school and to reach across social and political divides? How do we engage people in all parts of the world and raise the funding to make that happen? How do we organize and collaborate internationally? One way to imagine how feminist research, solidarity, community, and activism can develop over the next decade is to pay attention to and support the visions of our graduate and undergraduate students and teach them how to communicate their research effectively in public spaces.
Academia is lonely, so another way to create a feminist future is to expand the Women of Color Project model and offer mentorship and support to young women faculty, queer faculty, and disabled faculty. Because senior colleagues are still predominantly white men in many UO departments, a program could be created where a senior CSWS faculty affiliate can receive a small stipend to mentor a junior minority faculty member on how to navigate the university and speak the language of the institution, how to secure grants and career opportunities, how to achieve work-life balance given who we are and how we’re positioned on campus, and how to advocate for our own and our families’ needs in order to protect our time and energy from institutional service demands. A similar funded mentorship structure could be developed among early and advanced graduate students who are female-identified, BIPOC, queer, first generation, and disabled. These students often enter their home departments without any real sense of support, especially BIPOC students entering a predominantly white institution for the first time. So a feminist future is identifying the ways in which we’re being told we don’t belong or measure up, and doing what it takes to change those beliefs.
A feminist future is having the space and time to do our research during the regular work week, rather than sacrificing time for family, caregiving, and personal health needs. Given the teaching and service loads at all levels, there is little support for our research and creative output, despite the UO being an R1 institution. A solution could be research grants that offer time rather than money so our affiliates can be relieved of teaching or service burdens to complete their work.
A feminist future most obviously includes the concept of gender equity, though we should not take that for granted as we are in a moment when a dedication to diversity and inclusion, social justice, and concepts and initiatives that have empowered diverse communities are now under attack. We must think about the current rise of authoritarianism globally and the rolling back of women’s and human rights, and how democracy and social justice are interdependent. So a feminist future is a democratic one and must include these concepts and socially just spaces.
For a feminist future, we must also think bigger. As Dr. Anita Hill said in the Lorwin Lecture, we can take a bigger approach to gender-based violence. Big problems like this require a multidisciplinary approach, so we need to research collaboratively across academic and public spaces to find solutions and advocate for changes. Looking at all that we have learned and accomplished over 50 years as a feminist research center, what big problem should we focus on next, pulling together all our resources as CSWS affiliates across the UO campus and beyond? Collectively, we have the potential for multidisciplinary grants—partnerships that bring together researchers in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to address a major question through multiple levels of analysis in multiple disciplines. So what big problem most urgently needs to be resolved?
In the next five decades, CSWS can be a space for imagining and creating the feminist futures we want, need, and deserve.
—Jenée Wilde is the CSWS research dissemination specialist.