Wesleyan has had a successful, if checkered, experience with the women’s rights movement, according to a panel of Wesleyan alumni, current and former professors, and students. The panel spoke at a talk entitled “Feminism at Wesleyan: 1970 to the Present” in the Science Center on Friday. The panel’s all-white make-up, however, faced harsh criticism from panelist Zach Strassburger ’06 and attendee Ann DuCille, Professor of English and African-American Studies.
Despite 56 years as an all-male school, Wesleyan has historically been a forerunner of the women’s rights movement in education, according to the panel.
One of the criticisms of the panel was that it offered a narrow perspective of feminist experiences.
Strassburger said that he was initially put off by the homogeneity of the presenters asked to talk on the panel.
“I was really hesitant to speak on this panel after hearing this panel would be all white and female-assigned,” Strassburger told the audience. “This is one of the whitest rooms I’ve ever been in at Wesleyan. Women’s Studies is seen as a racist major.”
“I can’t help but look at this panel and feel my absence,” DuCille said. “I was the first woman hired here to teach Women’s Studies. I think this is a very sad commentary on how things haven’t changed.”
Panelists Arianna Thompson ’05 and Strassburger presented their own concerns about the changing meaning of feminism at Wesleyan, first explaining that the major would be renamed next year.
“Next year we will be Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,” Thompson said. “Women’s Studies has changed.”
Strassburger felt that important feminist issues regarding queerness and race had been neglected by the other panelists.
“I also think something that hasn’t been mentioned is how issues of queerness and gender deviance relate to race on campus,” Strassburger said. “Women of color have histories that are not being told here. Women of color have different relations to Wesleyan.”
The criticism came at the end of the talks, which predominantly consisted of fond recounting by former and current professors and alumni of their experiences ushering in the feminist movement in the 1970s.
“Wesleyan was quite unusual in going up to fifty-fifty [male to female ratio] quite quickly,” said Suzy Taraba ’77, University Archivist, who presented the chronology of the Wesleyan feminist movement.
She described important events in Wes women’s history from Wesleyan’s first coeducational experience from 1872 to 1912 to the struggle for women’s rights as the next wave of female students arrived in 1968. It was not until 1980, twelve years after the female students began arriving again, that Wesleyan founded its first Women’s Studies program, and not until 1989 that the Women’s Studies major was created as a full-fledged academic curriculum.
“Wesleyan was a bit behind the curve in establishing a Women’s Studies Department,” Taraba said. “There were already 270 [Women’s Studies Departments] across the country and Wesleyan was still struggling.”
Lucy Knight ’72 recollected how gratified she was to find at Wesleyan, after transferring from Wheaton College, an atmosphere that respected and accepted women as intellectual peers.
“They just treated intellectually like anyone else,” Knight said. “I really thrived on the fact that there was no active sexism at Wesleyan.”
After initially dismissing the feminists at Wesleyan as unduly angry, Knight said she became a feminist herself after writing her senior thesis on Wesleyan’s first period of coeducation, which was terminated in 1912 due to growing opposition from alumni.
“What I found was unfair and unjust treatment of women,” Knight said. “Men were frightened by women’s intellectual abilities.”
Panelist Gertrude Hughes, Professor of English and Women’s Studies, similarly discovered feminism while at Wesleyan, but as a professor. She explained how she had taught a tutorial on certain female writers with a few female undergraduates, one of whom designed a syllabus for the course.
“I was the mascot of the English Department,” Hughes said. “I never thought it was sexist to be treated as a mascot or as cute. I had no understanding of gender, of the construction of a second sex, of an otherness. It took me a while to learn about this. It began with a tutorial.”
Former Associate Provost Sheila Tobias, also on the panel, recounted her time at Wesleyan fighting to promote women in the faculty and student body. She explained that she believed most universities became coeducational to attract men, not to educate women.
“Wesleyan’s motivation for going co-ed was much different,” Tobias said. “Wesleyan was replacing Wes men with Wes women. Wesleyan had a strong sense that making change was legitimate.”
As Associate Provost, Tobias discovered bias against female professors and worked against that, helping to encourage equal treatment of female faculty and lobbying to increase financial and scholarship support to part-time professors, many of who were women with families.
According to Wood, today 30 percent of tenured professors at Wesleyan are women, compared to only 5 percent in 1977.
Despite all the work she did to change the policies of the Administration, Tobias explained that she had always been promoting Wesleyan’s interests.
“My goal was not to embarrass Wesleyan, or to fight it publicly,” Tobias said. “I was loyal to Wesleyan from the first day.”
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