25 years of women in t-shirts

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Oyez, Oyez, for Everywoman's, WOST, and
the Status of Women Council

It may seem trivializing to reduce this courageous phenomenon to T-shirts, but we're reaching for a metaphor here: a metaphor stressing that the feminist-activist impact on UMass was no ordinary academic development, whatever that might be.

Women's studies, women's centers, bulldog-determined committees devoted to the interests of women students and staff: these manifestations of second-wave feminism on American campuses didn't so much evolve from within as get lobbed in over the wall.

Like black studies before it, and much indebted to the influence and example of that field, women's studies programs and their allied organizations come out of a collective political and social quest: in this case, the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. And movements have stuff, ways of dressing, communicating, signalling allegiance. And in this sense, all those T-shirts and flyers and buttons with the chunky womyn-fist symbol are badges of honor.

I'm sort of the guard-dog of the T-shirts," smiles Karen Lederer '81, undergraduate adviser for women's studies at UMass. (WOST, in the course listings). We've come to ask her about WOST and the unusual "Women Activist Reunion" which, it's hoped, will bring alumnae and friends of all the pioneer groups back to campus this fall. And she's given us a T-shirt. But not a red one.

"You can't buy a red T-shirt," says Lederer. "You have to earn it." The presentation of the red T-shirts takes place every spring at a dinner honoring WOST's graduating seniors. As each approaches the dais, Lederer picks up a shirt rolled like a diploma and tied with a ribbon. She considers it emblematic that she usually either knows what size a student wants or can guess. "I'll think, she's small but she usually wears things baggy, or she's tall but she likes her clothes more fitted," she says. "I can do that because we know them."

Herself a STEPEC (social-thought-and-political-economics) grad, Lederer is predisposed to the critical and interdisciplinary approach of women's studies. But she can quantify its successes. Nearly a third of this year's twenty-three graduates were in the Honors Program. Nearly half received campus-wide awards. WOST alumnae include super-high-achievers: Susan Crane '88, executive director of International Family Health in London, is a favorite example right now because she'll be on campus for the reunion and as the Bateman Scholar-in-Residence.

"There are probably still people who wrinkle up their noses at women's studies," says Lederer. "But and this is a tribute to UMass, and how the program has been able to develop here for the most part we're like any other department."

Women's studies professor Arlene Avakian ('75G, '85G) agrees. But reluctantly. "We're no longer this very fringey group," concedes Avakian, who's taught in the program since almost before it really was one. "Maybe in some ways we've been coopted," she says.

UMass women's studies began in 1975 with four TA's. "Actually we began with nothing," Avakian amends. "The administration wanted us to do it all on release time. We had a space but no phone. We had no paper clips. And Everywoman's Center they were operating out of a hallway in Goodell!"

Two decades later, "We've become a department, we have tenured faculty; we've moved from being this marginal and marginalized program to being less so." WOST has offices in Bartlett; Everywoman's has the whole upper floor of Wilder Hall. Faculty who once treated women's studies as a joke ask to be listed in its course guide. "They're unhappy now if they're left out," says Avakian. "Because we have a reputation for having very good, very motivated students."

But Avakian recalls the '70s, when the pioneers of WOST, Everywoman's, and the Faculty Council on the Status of Women were all the same twenty or thirty people, and decisions on everything curriculum, hiring, policy were collective. "All the policy boards had slots for community people, slots for students; and then the meetings were open, and everybody came." When professor of comparative literature Catherine Portuges was hired as coordinator a position financed by combining two TA slots "she was interviewed by like twenty-five people," Avakian says. "There was a downside to collectivism," she adds with a smile.

But not much of a downside. "We were coming out of the women's liberation movement," she says. "Which connected with other social movements, and with the New Left, and with liberation struggles around the world. All that was encapsulated in women's studies. It was very alternative and very political and very exciting to me.

"Now the whole campus has changed so much, it's hard to keep a political focus in what we do. But things are still very hard for women out there. Things are very hard for the poor.

"Things are very hard for our students. I had a brilliant student who was homeless in Amherst with her eighteen-month-old son. So, yes, given where we started, we've come a long ways. But there's still a lot of work to do. And there's a lot of backsliding."

The Wilder Hall quarters of Everywoman's Center spacious, sunny, above all cozy look braced for a world with homeless student-mothers in it. The eldest of this trio of campus feminist organizations, Everywoman's was founded in 1972 with support from continuing education. Director Carol Wallace '71, 83G stresses, like Avakian, her program's extracurricular roots: "The founders were community women who wanted access to the resources of the university," she says.

The atmosphere was yeasty in the valley around 1970, say Wallace and others, with a loose collective called Amherst Women's Liberation sowing consciousness-raising groups like sunflowers and coming up with ideas like this one for meeting, counseling, and academic-support space for women returning to college. Twenty-five years later, Everywoman's can look back on some rough times. "There were years when there was not any support from the administration," says Wallace. "Now with Chancellor Scott we're in a much better position." Last years' budget was nearly $524,000, about three-quarters from UMass. (Another large chunk was a $109-thousand contract with the commonwealth; Everywoman's is the rape-crisis service for Hampden County.)

The same yeasty year that produced Everywoman's produced the Council on the Status of Women, an expression of solidarity with the wider movement by feminists already inside UMass. The council too, has persisted a quarter-century, and today is jointly chaired by Wallace and women's studies director Ann Ferguson.

"And that's not usual," says Wallace. "It's not usual for women's studies and women's centers be connected; it's not usual for faculty and professional staff to be connected. It says something about us."

In 1972 Ann Ferguson was one of the women inside, but newly so; a 1965 Ph.D. from Brown, she'd joined the philosophy faculty in 1964. Along with Lee Edwards, Arlyn Diamond, and others, Ferguson recalls the remarkable alliance between young activist faculty and an earlier generation, personified by dean of women Helen Curtis, who'd been pushing hard for women at UMass for decades. It was this coalition that formed the status of women council: a crucial faculty voice for Everywoman's Center and women's studies as the one struggled to stay alive and the other to be born.

Trench-warfare comes to mind as you listen to Ferguson on the status of women's studies: on the perpetual outsider-dom of the first generation of scholars in a field, who lack the imprimateur of apprenticeships with older academics; on the sense, as recently as 1995 when she took over at WOST, "that moving from professor to director of women studies was a step down."

Yet Ferguson doesn't look battle-worn at all. Her blue eyes sparkle as she talks about the successes of WOST, and even about its recent internal struggles. Accusations of racism some five years ago the faculty was all-white at the time inspired not only shouting and soul-searching but change. Two black women now teach in the department. Diverse racial, class, and gender perspectives have been more deliberately worked into the curriculum. The sense that "we needed to get back with Everywoman's Center" was also part of the process, Ferguson says.

Not that these challenges weren't painful, she acknowledges, especially for old lefties like herself. "But I think it's one of the ways that we're moving toward something really stellar."

That's a tall order! I think I must reject this!" crows Alexandrina Deschamps '81G, '96G, when we tell her that Karen Lederer says she represents "the future of women's studies." But she knows what Lederer means. Deschamps acknowledges "a passion for teaching" and mentoring, and since she's Afro-Caribbean with a background in international development, what she has to tell students is always internationally inflected.

She acknowledges too, that "our intake has changed" in recent years: WOST is attracting students of color in greater numbers. "Having a person of color up there in my heels and lipstick sure, it makes a difference," says Deschamps. "It breaks some stereotypes." And the presence of black faculty is allowing WOST to connect with CCEBMS, a support service for students of color, in ways it never before has. "I think we're opening up the department. There's a lot to do, but I think it's happening."

If feminists like Deschamps seem to be describing a new yeastiness on campus in these last years of the '90s, the Women Activists Reunion this fall may be the proof of the pudding. Lederer acknowledges that the event is to some extent "a giant experiment." To the best of the knowledge of everyone concerned, nothing quite like it has every been attempted before before: a reunion based on identification with an ideology rather than with a single group.

"It acknowledges all three," says Carol Wallace. "It acknowledges that all three groups have survived and thrived. And it acknowledges that the connection was there from the beginning."