by Jenée Wilde, Dissemination Specialist, CSWS , Senior Instructor, Department of English
Thomas Beaumont (Class of ’69) first met Professor Joan Acker as an undergraduate sociology and social welfare student at University of Oregon.
“Professor Acker was the social welfare researcher and nearly the only woman in the Sociology Department at the time,” Beaumont said. “She helped to prepare students for graduate school in social work. Being interested in that, I wound up in her classes and was supremely intrigued. She even made Principles of Social Policy intriguing and certainly to my liking in terms of social responsibility and got me enthused about being a bit of an activist.”
Acker taught sociology first as a doctoral student, then as an assistant professor in the department after she completed her degree in 1967. In a 2009 interview for the CSWS Annual Review, Acker, who passed away in 2016, said she was only the second woman to earn a sociology degree from UO.
“When I first came there were some faculty members—they were all men, of course—who were very supportive, and some who weren’t,” Acker told CSWS in 2009. “One professor said in class one day that he didn’t think the department should take any women as graduate students because they would just get married and have children. It was outrageous. And there were a lot of political fights in the department. The reigning men were pretty conservative, but that changed during the sixties.”
In addition to being Beaumont’s sociology professor, she was also his program advisor.
“She was someone I wanted to model myself after—the way she carried herself around campus, the way she went to bat for her students,” he said. “She was a terrific advocate.”
A mother of three, Acker returned to graduate school in the early 1960s after 13 years of professional experience in social work. Her husband, a psychologist at Stanford Medical School, came to UO to work in the College of Education in counseling. Prior to their move to Oregon, Acker had inquired at Stanford about applying for a PhD in sociology.
Acker told CSWS, “The head of the department told me there was no point in me even filling out an application because I was too old and I was a woman.” She was in her late twenties at the time. “Then very soon after that my husband got offered a job up here, and I applied to the department up here, and they were very different from Stanford, they were very welcoming. . . . Not that I never experienced any prejudice against women, or categorizations of any kind, I did experience that. But they were perfectly willing to have me come in, and some of the professors were very helpful.”
Beaumont experienced Acker as a “tremendously human and feeling and empathetic presence on a campus with about 13,000 students,” he said. “Classes were big and not every professor had the time to talk on the side or to try to help with a level of comfort or ease, and she did, not just with me but with others. I had some relationship problems that she helped me get through, and that encouraged me all the more to go into face-to-face casework or counseling.”
With Acker’s support and assistance, Beaumont went on to graduate school at University of Minnesota for a master’s in social work. “That choice was in part from the inspiration of Professor Acker,” he said. “Her general approach to life, her presentation, and certainly her philosophy of social justice were what inspired me. My work was to take that and try to invoke it in practice.”
Like Acker, Beaumont stayed at his alma mater after graduation, spending 30 years at UM as an assistant professor and clinical social worker. “When I first got back in touch with her, several years after graduating, she was so welcoming of my inquiring to see how she was and what she was doing,” he said. “She was so excited about her efforts to start the Center, and her enthusiasm about it was just touching.”
Acker told CSWS that, in the early 1970s, she wanted to establish a cross-disciplinary, campus-wide center at UO to research women: “[CSWS] was then called the Center for the Sociological Study of Women, and that was because there was no department other than sociology on the whole campus that would have anything to do with it.” The Center began in 1972-73 with funding for a part-time graduate assistant and space appropriated from the sixth floor of PLC with help from the administrative assistant in political science. Acker served as the Center’s first director.
“It was really a cooperative thing,” she told CSWS, “mostly me and Joyce Mitchell, who was in political science. And a couple of people from education: Jean Leppaluoto and maybe some other people. And not long after that it was Marilyn Farwell, who was in English. We got a little more status in the [sociology] department as the Center for the Sociological Study of Women [CSSW], and a little more money from the graduate school.”
Then in 1975, two significant events changed the Center’s future: Women’s studies was founded, which firmly instituted women’s research as a legitimate academic field, and special collections librarian Ed Kemp identified Jane Grant as somebody whose papers would be interesting to acquire. The rest, as they say, is history.
Over the years, Beaumont kept in touch with Acker, including visiting the Center after the William Harris endowment transformed the small, struggling CSSW into the much larger CSWS. “I remember meeting folks and listening to the plans as they were at the time,” he said. “It’s so involved in social justice and international things that it suits my taste.” Laughing, he added, “I also know that if I contribute monetarily it’s not going to go to the athletic department.”
Acker told CSWS in 2009 why research on women remains crucial: “Women have made tremendous gains, if I compare what the University of Oregon looked like in 1970 with now. In 1970, [only] 5 percent of the full professors . . . were women—we’ve made extraordinary gains. Research on gender and women is legitimate now, it’s even establishment almost, which undermines it in a way, but okay. At the same time, there is a lot of subtle sexism going on, and that has made it more difficult to deal with than the very overt kinds of discriminations against women; it’s hard to study; it’s hard to get hold of, and yet a lot of women know that it is happening.”
As a 45-year supporter of research on women, Beaumont donates regularly to CSWS—both in memory of his former mentor and to support the Center’s ongoing mission.
“To me, it’s a primary effort that’s long overdue—to look very carefully at the skills, abilities, and informal power that women have, to give them a just recognition of that, and to support that and bring it out in the open,” Beaumont said. “Oftentimes, in my view, women are punished and disadvantaged for things that are critical for society functioning peaceably. The obvious thing now is women’s ability to help with conflict. How do women work in a family or communal circumstance and keep everything together? And let’s look at this on an international basis, too. We need to know the powers and the values that other cultures have to recognize and also to marginalize women so that we can try to find ways around that from within and without. So often the rich, powerful, and famous are men because that’s how history is written. That’s the paradigm I’ve lived through, and it’s not gotten us very far, and it’s not right.”
—Jenée Wilde is a senior instructor of English and managing editor for the CSWS Annual Review.