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Gender and Sexuality
in Higher Education |
Scroll down for information about each item in the exhibit.
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Exhibit curated by Anna Steffens '10
Published Spring 2010
College campuses provide fertile ground for discussions of gender and
sexuality, and the BCRW archive reflects the importance of these ongoing
discussions over the past 40 years. With a particular emphasis on
women's education, this exhibit includes editorials, articles, reports,
and pamphlets from both inside and outside of the classroom. Reflecting
diverse issues including sexual harassment, coming out, and the
development of women's studies, the following documents demonstrate how
sexuality and gender have played key roles in shaping life on campuses
and in classrooms across the nation.
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How Harvard Rules Women
Published by the New University Conference, 1970
"In the late 1960s Harvard comparative literature graduate student
Ellen Cantarow (Ph.D. GSAS 1971), together with several other Harvard
women, conceived the idea of a booklet, 'How Harvard Rules Women'—its
title an ironic play on that of another left publication, 'How Harvard
Rules,' by male students, about Harvard's power relations. Produced
cooperatively by unpaid writers, 'How Harvard Rules Women' has no signed
articles—a demonstration that individual egotism had no part in this
booklet, executed in the spirit of the then-nascent women's movement.
Nick Thorkelson designed and illustrated the finished product, which was
widely distributed and read."
—Ellen Cantarow, August, 2009
Copyrighted by The New University Conference, a radical left
organization of graduate students and younger faculty, BCRW posts it
with the permission of Ellen Cantarow, a member of The New University
Confernce. 'How Harvard Rules Women' is also exhibited at The Arthur and
Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
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"Barnard Women's Liberation Paper"
By Ellen Nasper '71 and Lynda Horhota '72, c. September 1970
Written following the infamous series of student protests in the spring
of 1968, this paper comments on the involvement of Barnard Women's
Liberation (a group of students advocating for women's rights) in the
Barnard and Columbia riots. These riots are remembered today for being
quintessentially symbolic of 1960s student activism against the Vietnam
War and racism within the U.S. Women's Liberation members Nasper and
Horhota, themselves Barnard students during this period of upheaval,
preserve the memory of women's involvement in this struggle. Nasper and
Horhota report that women were oppressed even within the leftist student
movement, and they link racism, sexism, and government oppression in
their arguments against the war and for women's equality. They felt
especially proud that the university-wide strike encouraged Barnard
"women, despite diverse political philosophies and factional
differences, to take a united stand on the issues that affect us all."
This position paper serves as a vitally important record of that unified
stand, as well as the accompanying surge in interest in women's
liberation afforded by the increase in attention on student activism at
Barnard and Columbia.
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Female Studies V, Proceedings of the Conference "Women and Education: A Feminist Perspective"
Edited by Rae Lee Siporin
Published by Know, Inc., 1972
This lengthy report is comprised of papers from a 1972 conference on
the state and future of women's studies and the position of women in the
academy. Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh and the Modern
Language Association Commission on the Status of Women, this conference
was an important step towards greater inclusion of women's issues and
feminist critique in the undergraduate curriculum. Conference papers,
contributed by prominent scholars like Catharine Stimpson and Gerda
Lerner, covered broad topics in education including effective teaching
strategies for women, balancing academic and personal obligations, women
in literature, and women's history. Siporin claimed that the most
important lesson learned at the conference, though, was that "community
does not magically take place with the exclusion of men" and women in
academia must work to overcome differences and the tolls of multiple
forms of oppression. This report, along with other editions of Female
Studies, helped to spur on an explosion of women's studies programs
at colleges across the nation in the 1970s.
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"Academic Feminists and the Women's Movement," Ain't I A Woman? 4.1
Published by Ain't I A Woman? Collective, April 1973
While many female scholars fought to found women's studies programs
in the early 1970s, some radical feminists did not agree with their
tactics. When professors called for greater unity and equality within
academic institutions, these activists pointed out that the existing
power structure divided the women's movement and gave academic feminists
unfair control over this movement. Clearly, women found widely disparate
ways to participate in feminism in the early 1970s, and this essay
represents a direct challenge to most mainstream views of the time. In
the context of this exhibit on gender and sexuality in higher education,
the authors of this paper reveal important problems inherent in such a
focus. Female academics, they argue, are granted an excess of
institutionally-based resources that afford them a monopoly over
funding, visibility, and above all knowledge in the women's movement.
The structural advantages that allow them to rise through the ranks of
academia in turn give them disproportionate power over other,
potentially more radical feminists. The essay, with its biting sarcasm
and strident critiques, provides a challenging viewpoint that is
important for modern feminist scholars to acknowledge. It is, perhaps,
still very true today that women in higher education (and thus, often
women of privileged class and racial identities) achieve unfair
dominance with regard to feminist politics and activism.
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Handbook for University Office Workers—Organizing for Change
Published by 9 to 5, Organization for Women Office Workers, October 1974
Issues of gender and sexuality are very relevant in the realm of
higher education, but not only inside the classroom, as evidenced by
this labor organizing pamphlet. Written by female office workers
employed in several Boston-area institutions, this guide offers advice
on affirmative action, employment law, and union organization for women
employed by universities. It also includes statistics on salary,
benefits, and tuition remission for administrative staff at several
local universities. With the help of feminist ideology and fellow
organizers, the women of the 9 to 5 Universities Committee were able to
begin to improve working conditions, compensation, and overall treatment
of female office workers at many colleges around Boston and beyond.
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"Sexual Harassment: What It Is, What to Do About It"
Published by Women Organized Against Sexual Harassment, c. 1980
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, sexual harassment became a hot-button
issue for women on college campuses across America. This pamphlet,
published by students at the University of California at Berkeley, was
one of many publications calling for increased awareness of and response
to sexual harassment and assault at universities. Berkeley students
reported an alarmingly high incidence of sexual harassment there, thanks
to a concentration of men with power over the academic and professional
lives of women working with them. Students used this pamphlet to educate
women about their rights and encourage their university to institute an
improved grievance procedure for complaints of harassment and sex
discrimination. Many other universities, including Columbia University,
went through similar (and often quite lengthy and difficult) processes
of creating and implementing policies against sexual harassment.
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"A Study of the Learning Environment at Women's Colleges: Highlights of the Study"
Published by the Women's College Coalition, Spring 1981
This report highlights significant findings of a study undertaken by
the Women's College Coalition to examine educational environments at 117
women's colleges across the nation. The Coalition surveyed presidents
and faculty members at these schools to determine whether women's
colleges provided better support and attention for female
undergraduates. According to this report, the study was a huge success;
the Coalition's findings show that the vast majority of presidents and
faculty incorporated the unique needs, perspectives, and contributions
of women into their work. The "identity and purpose [of these schools]
flow directly from their commitment to women, and [their] identity and
purpose are deepened by a new fusion of that purpose with the
intellectual work of the college." Thus, both inside and outside of the
1980s college classroom, women's institutions focused (at least to some
extent) on instilling students with an awareness of gender in all its
complexities. Though there are fewer women's colleges left now than in
1981, schools like Barnard continue to rely on single-sex education to
foster a supportive, intellectually stimulating environment for their
students.
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"The Lesbian Experience at Barnard: Women's Studies/Lesbians At Barnard Forum"
Prepared by Lesbians at Barnard and performed February 21, 1983
Lesbians at Barnard, also known as LAB, was founded in 1972 as
Barnard's first and only group for lesbian-identified students. The
group continues today as Q and is now open to students of any sexual or
gender identity from Barnard and Columbia. In 1983, in response to
student concerns over homophobia and campus climate at the college, LAB
held a forum to air concerns shared by many lesbian students. In order
to protect the anonymity of these students, and also to provide an
entertaining reversal in traditional roles, LAB enlisted six faculty
members to read excerpts from interviews with a reporter from the
Barnard Bulletin. Despite the fact that LAB had only about 30
active members at the time, the forum attracted over 100 interested
students, faculty, and staff, thanks to the thought approach to the
subject matter and the unique format of the discussion.
The transcript of this forum is a deeply fascinating reminder of the
difficulties of life on campus, even a campus as supposedly tolerant as
Barnard's, for gay students in the early 1980s. For Barnard's lesbian
students, forces of homophobia and oppression were subtle but ever
present factors in one's education. "It's not as if they have to walk
around with a sign saying, 'LESBIANS GO HOME,'" one student said,
"because if they did someone would probably say, 'What lesbians?'"
Students cited this lack of visibility and institutional support as
major obstacles in the quest for equality and respect on campus. Today's
Barnard student activists still work towards these same goals. Lesbian,
gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender students at many colleges and
universities have early activist groups like LAB to thank for their
current positions of relative safety, visibility and power.
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Women in Education, Vol. 2, No. 1
Published by Women in Education, Winter 1984
Women in Education was a national newspaper devoted to
covering all issues related to women in education—as students, parents,
and teachers—at all levels. This issue profiles several women who rose
to leadership roles within their individual institutions, and it
encouraged other women to aim for similar positions of power within the
educational establishment. Additionally, an article by Patricia Ann
Walton and Dr. Patricia Mitchell argues that women's colleges can
provide an exceptional learning environment for those who choose to take
advantage of it. Walton and Mitchell also claim that "the women's
college can play a major role in bridging the gap between different
groups of women," and that women's colleges must reach out to
non-traditional students to diversify their campus communities. Other
topics covered in this issue include female heroism, sexual harassment,
and research on minority women. Clearly, the editors of Women in
Education aimed to empower women educators to take on new positions
of leadership and tackle difficult issues within higher education as a
field.
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The Chilly Classroom Climate: A Guide to Improve the Education of Women
By Bernice Resnick Sandler, Lisa A. Silverberg, and Roberta M. Hall
Published by the National Association for Women in Education, Washington, DC, 1996
(When the NAWE closed in 2000, Higher Education Resource Services
(HERS) and other non-profit organizations that supported NAWE's mission
of advancing women in higher education received title to their assets.
NAWE archives are at Bowling Green State University. HERS received the
copyright and authority to distribute The Chilly Climate: A Classroom
Guide to Improve the Education of Women and has granted BCRW permission
to post it here. Visit the HERS website at:
www.hersnet.org.)
This intriguing report examines teaching style, student behavior,
curricular reform, and numerous other aspects of the college experience
to analyze the ways in women and men experience the classroom
differently. The authors pay close attention to various forms of
diversity along with gender—race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, ability,
and age are all mentioned in a special section entitled
"Intersections—Difference Matters." Educational research like this,
which takes time to consider the differential impact of gender alongside
other variables of identity and oppression, became more prevalent
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The Chilly Classroom Climate
concludes with several recommendations for ways that administrators,
faculty members, and students can improve access for women and other
under-represented groups. The impressive scope and length of this report
signals both the need for improvement in college classrooms and the
desire for improvement from educational scholars and practitioners
alike.
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Token, No. 2
Published Spring 1996
Though the poems, stories, and artwork published in Token do
not directly comment on higher education, this student-produced magazine
is doubtless an important document in the history of gender and
sexuality on the Columbia University campus. Token was a
short-lived publication that aimed to publish student work with a queer
sensibility, and this issue, subtitled "queer and free," epitomizes that
mission. These student authors write about sex, relationships, and other
ways of claiming "queerness", and their art offers commentary on being
young and radical in 1990s America. In Emily Harris's story "Tiffany's,"
the author describes her relationship with a 17-year-old girl living on
the streets of New York City. Through the course of this short,
tumultuous affair, Harris gains a new perspective on class and sexuality
and comes to realize that she is a "pre-med music major at Barnard
College of Columbia Fucking University, who had everything going for
her, and never realized it until then." This story is ingeniously
accompanied by a photo of two white, male "Queer Action Figures": "We're
Just Like YouÑSexist. Racist. Classist." Later in the issue,
Token includes a satirical set of personal ads and "favorite
things." For the students who worked on this issue, higher education
stretched outside Columbia's hallowed halls to include art, activism,
and personal growth in the larger spheres of New York City and the
world. Their work leaves its readers with some impression of the
subversive queer cultural productions that students are capable of
creating on Barnard and Columbia's campuses.
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CLAGSnews, Vol. XI, No. 2
Published by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Summer 2001
As a leader in the developing fields of LGBT and queer studies,
CUNY's Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) is widely acclaimed
for its work promoting scholarship on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender issues and communities. This issue of CLAGS's newsletter,
published in CLAGS's tenth anniversary year, highlights a conference on
the future of LGBT studies at "the 21st century university." Featuring
remarks from esteemed scholars like Judith Butler, Sharon Holland, John
D'Emilio, and Judith Halberstam, the conference probed the many ways in
which queer knowledge and subject matter can be incorporated into modern
college curricula. The rest of this issue of the newsletter includes
pieces on racial bodies, web resources in a class focused on queer
subcultures, and queer motherhood, along with news about CLAGS's many
lectures and other events. This diverse collection of brief articles
sheds light on the rich nature of queer studies even in its relatively
nascent stages. At the beginning of the new millennium, CLAGS serves as
one of many outposts in higher education designed to make people think
more constructively about gender, sexuality, and other forms of
difference and how they help shape our complex society.
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