‘First Women’ Step Into Spotlight : UCLA Celebrates Breakthrough Efforts of Faculty, Staff

The party at the UCLA Faculty Center last Tuesday night had the look and feel of a family gathering. It was--a female family gathering. The Friends of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women had come out to honor about 40 UCLA women who were first--the first woman to hold a particular faculty, staff, administrative or volunteer position at UCLA.

Friends founder Bea Mandel said she thought sufficient hurdles had been cleared already to identify the women and celebrate. Mandel herself is the first woman to serve as president of the Alumni Assn., and as Alumni UC regent, from 1986-1988. She said it was particularly fitting that the center, founded in 1984 as the UC system’s first research institute to focus on the study of women and gender-related issues, take an in-house look at the impact of women and the women’s movement on UCLA.

College President

Rosemary Park Anastos, who became vice chancellor for educational plans and programs in 1967, was there. Before coming to UCLA, Anastos said, she had been president of two colleges: New York City’s Barnard College from 1962-67, and Connecticut College for Women from 1947 to 1962. She had started at Connecticut College in 1935, she said.

How old did that make her?

“About 1,000,” she laughed, indicating that was her best and final estimate.

Others honored included Dean Susan Westerberg Prager who became dean of the Law School in 1983; M. E. Davis, editor-in-chief of the Daily Bruin in 1954; Page Ackerman, university librarian from 1973-77; Ruth Boak, first to join the Medical School faculty in 1947; Helen Astin, first associate provost of the College of Letters and Science from 1983-87.

Some of those firsts were hard won and the victories often felt more lonely than triumphant. Although affection, loyalty and pride in UCLA were all abundantly palpable Tuesday night, the event raised a few unpleasant memories.

Chancellor Incensed

Sheila Kuehl offered her own first as an example. Now a lawyer and a managing attorney for the new Southern California Women’s Law Center (not connected with UCLA), in 1972 she was associate dean of students in UCLA’s student organizations office and helped found the Women’s Resource Center.

“I almost lost my job,” she said. “We were located in the library and at the last minute the chancellor wouldn’t let us open. . . . We broke in, painted it, took out a full page ad in the Bruin. . . .”

Although she described the chancellor’s reaction as “incensed” and said they had received a stern warning, things went no further. “If they had fired us, they would have had no non-academic student services,” she said.

In her remarks to the group, UCLA’s highest-ranking woman on campus, Andrea Rich, vice chancellor for academic administration, herself a first in this current job, put the evening in comic perspective. There was a time, she said, when the faculty of UCLA was composed of 76% women. Today women make up about 22% of the faculty.

Birth of UCLA

In 1919, she explained, the properties of the Los Angeles State Normal School, which offered mostly teacher courses, were transferred to the UC regents, thus forming UCLA.

At the time, she said, there were 1,232 faculty members and 76% were women. By the 1920-21 academic year, women made up 61% of the faculty, and a decline began.

“What do you make of that, Jeanne Giovannoni?” Rich called out across the dining room, abandoning her prepared text to laughing calls of “downhill ever since.” Giovannoni, a first as associate vice chancellor for faculty relations, is responsible for affirmative action.

“The most important thing to remember about the 22%,” Giovannoni said later, “is that the proportion of women faculty has doubled in the past 10 years.”

Home-Ec Days

In the early days of UCLA, predominantly women’s departments such as home economics were phased out and women faculty virtually disappeared, then gradually made their reappearance one by one in all-male bastions.

The evening seemed to help compensate many women who came. It was a simple rather than fancy or gala affair, yet those being honored took such pleasure in it that it was clearly apparent they had received little recognition for their contributions.

Rich ended the evening by saying they would all be remiss not to remember another group of women: “Those women who were qualified and didn’t get the job.”