Women’s Studies celebrates 40 years

Irene Frieze remembers a time when female professors kept quiet about their involvement with the Women’s Studies Program because it would keep them from receiving tenure at the University.

Forty years after the establishment of the program, Frieze, a psychology professor, addressed a room of about 30 people — professors, graduate students and guest speakers included — about the early years of the Women’s Studies Program. Frieze’s lecture was one of six lectures and panels addressing contemporary education and gender studies that Pitt’s Women’s Studies Program, the second oldest in the country after San Diego State University, hosted in Posvar Hall Friday. The event served in part to celebrate the program’s 40th anniversary as an established component of the University. The celebration, also comprised of events on Thursday, included readings and musical and dramatic performances.

“There were a lot of mixed feelings about us,” said Frieze, who moved to Pittsburgh to help establish the Women’s Studies Program in 1972. “Our priority was to establish an academic program.”

Frieze noted that the main challenge was getting Pitt to acknowledge the program as part of the academic world.

As a professor of psychology as well as a member of the Women’s Studies Program, Frieze said that many fields, such as psychology, do not recognize that women’s studies can be incorporated into all studies.

“We’re still battling that,” she said.

Frieze also discussed the differences in the way people perceive women’s studies today in comparison to the way they viewed the field in its earlier years. Today, the energy and excitement of establishing a new program has died down.

“It’s a different kind of world,” Frieze said, mentioning that today, men are involved with the program. “Everything is evolving and changing.”

In the early years of the program, groups of graduate students would set up courses in women’s studies because there were few professors in the field.

At the time, there was more of a community activist edge in setting up the program, according to Frieze. However, in order to gain academic credibility, the group of graduate students and professors soon set up proper courses.

After gaining acknowledgment from the University, the program moved back to its community-like setting where women could study gender issues and remain active in fighting for women’s rights. According to Frieze, this is helpful today as students hope to connect their work in other fields to the field of women’s studies. This adaptation also allows students to study the aspects of women’s studies that focus more on activism.

In the 40 years of its existence, Pitt’s Women’s Studies Program has doubled its course offerings and incorporated courses that cover many of Pitt’s general education requirements, according to Jean Ferguson Carr, associate professor of English and director of the Women’s Studies Program. The program now offers more than 100 courses across various disciplines.

“The access women students have to things has changed dramatically,” Carr said.

One panel consisting of lecturers from the Women’s Studies Program focused on “Pedagogy and the New Women’s Studies Classroom.” Panelists discussed their courses and the advances the program has made since its establishment.

Frayda Cohen, a Women’s Studies senior lecturer, directed the Pitt in China program last summer in which she worked on relating women’s studies to the world. Part of the challenge in getting students to learn about women’s studies is relating the classroom rhetoric to issues in the real world, according to the panelists.

“There’s a lot of theoretical spillover,” Cohen said of the academic aspects of the program. The faculty works to give students a different view on the structures of power in other countries.

In addition to globalizing the Women’s Studies Program in recent years, the faculty has also worked to incorporate technology into teaching. To bring home issues in gender politics, many of the faculty use a blog function on the Women’s Studies Program’s website.

“I found that bringing a blog into class actually made students talk a lot more,” Cohen said.

Students use the blog to share links about current events in women’s studies and discuss the issues. According to Cohen, the blog acts as an interactive medium, bringing current issues affecting women into the classroom.

Other panelists also created new ways to foster communication among students.

In her Introduction to Women’s Studies course, Kimberly Creasap, a visiting lecturer in the program, had her students create zines — small pamphlets of self-published work — for their reading and writing assignments.

“They were perfect for issues that aren’t really covered in academic literature,” Creasap said. “The zines personalized things that would theoretically go over students’ heads.”

Such changes in the course materials along with the expansion of the program into fields such as law and health have made the Women’s Studies Program successful, Carr said.

Although the program was established 40 years ago, Carr feels that there is still a lot of excitement among the faculty.

“It was thrilling,” Carr said of the program when it was first created. “You felt like you were doing something kind of earth-shattering. But it’s like that now. When I see the kinds of teaching that’s going on, it’s very exciting.”