Women’s Studies at SDSU: First and Still Among Best

When Marilyn Boxer announced in the early 1970s that she planned to focus on women’s issues for her doctorate dissertation in history, the chairman of her department at UC Riverside didn’t offer her a lot of encouragement.

“(He) said to me, ‘You’d better have your book published by 1974, because (women’s studies is) a fad,’ ” she recalled.

Boxer persevered, and by 1974 she not only had her doctorate subject validated, she had become chairwoman of the women’s studies program at San Diego State University, which was established in 1970 as the nation’s first.

The program was in great disarray when she took over, Boxer said. The original women’s studies faculty had agreed it was unethical to be associated with a patriarchal institution and had resigned en masse.

“I came into a brand-new tiny office without a secretary and without any materials,” said Boxer, now the dean of arts and letters at SDSU. “The first thing I did was sit down and order pencils and paper.”

She also had a much more serious goal: “to show that feminist scholarship was not a contradiction in terms, that there was a great deal of very serious scholarship that could and should be done.”

Today, women’s studies has developed “way beyond the expectations of its founders,” Boxer said. Of the 503 programs nationwide, SDSU’s remains one of the strongest, for several reasons:

-It is one of the largest, with eight faculty positions and a roster of more than 30 courses. Among this semester’s offerings are “Women in American History,” “Women and the Law,” “Women and Health,” “Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” “20th-Century Women’s Fiction,” and “Economics of Women and Work.”

-About 1,300 students take women’s studies courses every semester at SDSU. Nine of the program’s courses are on a list of 120 that fulfill the general education requirement.

“Even though most of these students don’t have the concern the early students had, it’s quite possible to arouse their interest,” Boxer said. She believes a real difference in attitudes could be measured if students were tested before and after the 15-week classes.

-SDSU has one of the few women’s studies programs in the country with departmental status, meaning it controls its own hiring, firing and curriculum development.

“It’s very hard to maintain a strong program if you’re not a department, because the resources and rewards in a university are allocated along departmental lines,” Boxer said.

-The program allows students to graduate with a major in women’s studies. SDSU now has 25 students working toward such degrees, compared to four in 1982, the first year the major was offered.

“It has scholars that are well-known, it was at the forefront of establishing women’s studies programs, and it has survived well for almost 20 years,” said Caryn McTighe Musil, director of the National Women’s Studies Assn.

Size and Longevity

Deborah Rosenfelt, coordinator of women’s studies at San Francisco State University, said the size and longevity of the San Diego program “give it a kind of depth and strength and coherence that very few programs have.”

Growth in numbers and influence are by no means the only changes that have occurred since the early days of women’s studies. The activists who demanded the courses in the late 1960s have been replaced by a more conservative breed of student, and the impromptu, often highly personal nature of the first classes has given way to a traditional educational model involving lectures, texts and exams.

“It used to be that women’s studies teaching was consciousness-raising. You’d go into a class and you’d find out who you were as a woman,” said Bonnie Zimmerman, now the department chair at SDSU.

“To some extent that still goes on, but there’s also much more academic rigor in women’s studies than there used to be. That’s because we have 20 years of research to build on.”

Actually More Receptive

Seated in one of the three small, comfortable department offices, which feature posters of women’s art on every wall, Zimmerman said that in some ways, contemporary students are actually more receptive to women’s studies than students of 20 years ago.

“When I first began teaching women’s studies in 1970 at the State University of New York in Buffalo, we were trying to break completely new ground,” she said. “We were raising issues about women’s inequality that nobody took seriously.

“Nowadays, students--male and female alike--understand (the issues that were being raised originally). The difference is they now think everything has been done. They think there are now no barriers for women at all.”

In fact, Zimmerman said she and others are addressing all of the same issues they raised in the earliest women’s studies courses, as well as the vast range of feminist theory and information that has evolved over the past two decades. The extent and causes of violence against women, hardly discussed 20 years ago, are routinely incorporated into current women’s studies programs.

A ‘Richer’ Understanding

“In addition, we--meaning the primarily white, middle-class women who developed women’s studies--have become much more aware of the necessity of integrating the realities of black women and other minority women, working-class women, lesbian women,” Zimmerman said. “There’s a richer kind of understanding that comes out of the diversity of women’s experiences.”

Also new to the curriculum since the late 1960s is an analysis of the social and political climate that set the stage for the modern women’s movement--a climate women were then experiencing directly.

The political organizing and protests they engaged in are now modern history, and are covered in “Sex, Power and U.S. Politics,” a class taught by associate professor Kathy Jones.

Jones, who can become fiery when discussing the issues in which she was personally involved, pressed her students during a recent evening class.

Slogan from the ‘60s

“What was the slogan that became so important in the 1960s?” she asked.

The class of some 25 women and 10 men was silent.

Jones tried again.

“What four words became synonymous with the banner under which the women’s movement was mobilized?”

Finally, Jones answered her own question: “It was ‘The personal is political.’ ”

Not all of her classes are that unresponsive, Jones said, nor does the response necessarily indicate a lack of interest.

“Sometimes I’ll talk to students afterward who will not have said a word but who will come up to me after class and say, ‘That was really exciting today.’ What seems to be lacking in a lot of the students I have now is a sense of the passion I feel about my own teaching. They wonder why I get so excited.”

Students Still Affected

While they may not be engaging in the intense political discussions in which Jones took part, several of her students said the class does affect them strongly.

“At 39, I’ve lived all of these issues, I was involved in the women’s movement,” said Julie Mizer. “I’ve taken other women’s studies courses and I’ve had people say they thought the material presented was radical in some sense, whereas to me it’s reality.”

“As women become liberated, so do men, “ said Richard Sutton, a 35-year-old philosophy major who plans to teach history. “It takes a lot of pressure off being a man.”

But enthusiasm isn’t limited to the older students. Terri Bartolero, 22, initially took a women’s studies course to fulfill a general education requirement.

“I just started taking more and more courses because I started becoming awakened to all of these issues,” said Bartolero, who eventually decided to major in women’s studies. “Things started clicking--issues of sexual harassment, dealing with women’s sexuality. Things just made sense.”

Bartolero, who plans to become a commercial pilot, has wondered whether a women’s studies degree will provoke discrimination from potential employers. But she has decided the things she has learned will actually help her when she has to deal with the male-dominated aviation field.

Lili Feingold, 25, is a 1985 graduate of the SDSU program. She agrees that the major is an asset in the working world. Following graduate work in Israel, Feingold started job hunting and was hired by Boy Scouts of America, setting up co-ed Explorer posts for high school students.

“They wanted to know what kind of person would take a women’s studies major,” she said of the people who interviewed her for the job. “They didn’t understand what the curriculum was, and it gave me a good chance to explain it. They saw I was a unique individual.”

She said the question she hears most often in business situations is, “Do you hate men?”

“My response is, ‘No, I do not hate men,’ ” Feingold said firmly. “I hate a lot of things that our male culture has done. But if anything, it makes me love the men that I love that much more--like my father, for all the good things he’s done.”

Although SDSU’s program deals mostly with the university students who enroll in the courses, it also offers a number of programs for the community at large, including a Wednesday afternoon lecture series, “New Views of Women.” It will present daily events in honor of Women’s History Week, March 7-11.

Zimmerman also promises a celebration of women’s studies when the department celebrates its 20th anniversary next year.