Why Women's Studies on the Web?  The Personal

In the tradition of women's studies, I want to preface my remarks about women’s studies and internet distance courses by exploring my personal connection with the project, by giving you some background on who am I and how I became involved in teaching women’s studies via distance education.  My own journey exploring women's studies as I have moved from small universities to large ones and back again, and from student to teacher, can illustrate both the alienation and the empowerment that students might experience as they study the impact of gender in their lives.

I’m originally from Florence, South Carolina—a small town with just over 30,000 residents.  When I was 21, I graduated from Francis Marion, a college in my hometown that enrolled almost 4,000 students when I attended.  After graduation, I went directly to graduate studies in English at the University of Alabama, which enrolled at that time about 20,000 students.  Needless to say, it was quite a culture shock.  At Alabama, I experienced my first formal introduction to women's studies—while when I look back at my course notes, I see that we studied a wide range of issues in feminist interpretation of culture, my primary memory from the course is my bewilderment at being chided rather vigorously by a couple of classmates for having bought into the establishment by marrying.

Despite my memory of what I considered a rather rude introduction, I became very engaged in the work of interpreting literature and culture through the lens of gender and race, and I was able to expand those teaching interests during a two-year stint as a lecturer in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University.  This unusual department combines composition with an emphasis on American history and culture, and offers a course titled “Writing:  Women in America,” which I taught in 1997.  The vast majority of the students enrolled in that class were traditional age college students, predominantly young white women.  Their consensus was that feminism was dead, that women were equal in today’s society, and that feminists were dangerous extremists whose goal in life was to destroy men.  As one student wrote, "When I think of a feminist, I picture a man-hating woman, standing in a great mass of women, screaming for women's rights."  As you can imagine, I found this attitude was somewhat disheartening, but by focusing on history early in the semester, I tried to provide some context for the students' perceptions of feminism, and I think I was successful in changing this attitude somewhat, in part because I had shared those misperceptions myself as a college student.

In 1998, I came back to South Carolina when I accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster.  My first year, I taught eight sections of composition and literature courses, but I also began immediately to develop a relationship with the Women’s Studies Program.  My experience of a university life was much richer and diverse at USCL in that I had daily interaction with colleagues from many different disciplines—at Michigan State, I'm not sure I met a single person outside my department, with the exception of the library staff.  But our total English faculty consists of 5 people, one tenured, two tenure track, and two instructors—we're too small to be an official department, and are instead members of the humanities division.  While the English faculty are close, I nevertheless felt a deep need to create for myself a larger body of colleagues, and I began to travel to the much larger Columbia campus regularly to use the library for a research project I was engaged in and to meet other faculty with whom I shared interests.  Through these connections, I heard about the Women's Studies faculty retreat, which was open to any faculty member with an interest in women's studies.  Shortly after attending my first retreat, I was invited to join the Women’s Studies department as an affiliate faculty member.  Our program's interdisciplinary mission and structure means we have nine core faculty members, who share joint appointments with Women's Studies and other departments, and 85 affiliate faculty members, who engage in teaching and research on issues of gender and race, and who provide service to the program as well.  While not all Columbia departments work to establish connections with their colleagues on the regional campuses, the Women's Studies program has been active in seeking both working and personal relationships with regional campus faculty members, and in supporting course offerings on our campuses.

When, with the program's support, I offered my first women’s studies course on the Lancaster campus, the class, WOST L111: Women in Culture, was the first introductory-level gender studies course to be offered here in almost a decade.  I chose not to use computers in the course at all; new courses often have a difficult time meeting enrollment quotas here, and I was afraid that a computer component might deter students who were otherwise interested in the course.  As it was, the class was very small; only eight students—all women—enrolled, but the administration at USCL was encouraging of my offering the course, so the Academic Dean let the course make.  Two or three of these students were what we would define as traditional, with the remaining being women who were mothers of varying ages or returning to school, or both.  These students, like my students at MSU, saw feminism in a negative light; but unlike those young women, the students at USCL did not believe that women and men were treated equally in society (and in one case, did not believe strictly equal treatment was necessary).

Indeed, only one of the eight was willing to identify herself as a feminist, while another student commented that she wasn’t willing to “shove my beliefs down anyone’s throats,” so therefore was not a feminist.  Another remarked that she felt women often faced inequalities, particularly in divorce, but explained that “I don’t talk about it all the time and complain about it like I believe a feminist would.”  Their ideas about feminism were both complex and uninformed; one student wrote the following:  “I think that feminists are pushing for stuff they don’t really want.  Maybe trying to see if society will let them be equal to men.  But I bet you if they stopped and thought they would slow down and let society evolve us into its path instead of pushing themselves to be like men.”  While this student held to a body of accepted thought about the perils of feminism, she also seemed aware of the dangers of attempting to reconstruct “woman” in a way that accepted unconditionally a “male” way of being as valuable.  Clearly women’s studies was something these students felt they needed—most of them could only count the course as elective credit, if that—but they clearly also had a substantial set of misconceptions about what women’s studies was.

And why shouldn’t they?  These students had never studied women in their courses before—a few women writers, including Emily Dickinson, for instance—but never in high school had they taken, for instance, even a history course that dealt with women in any substantial way.  In the first week, when I asked students to write in response to a question about what they expected to learn in the course, titled Women in Culture, they almost uniformly expected that they would learn about what women had accomplished in American culture, a “Great Women” course of sorts.  The title of the course did indeed support that reading.  The course as I envisioned it, I told them, would be a critical thinking course in which we would study the societal effects of gender on our lives and in our communities—meeting Great Women along the way, of course, along with other women not so “Great” but just as relevant.  Our first project together as a class, then, was to assemble a list of topics of interest to us as a group and to construct for the semester a schedule of work and reading, discussions and presentations.  The students energetically participated in this activity, commenting regularly that they’d never been a part of defining the content of their courses, the focus of their studies.  The work these students did led me to think a great deal about how Women's Studies courses are offered, and as we began to study the demographics of our state and our university, I became committed to continuing this work.