Interaction

A few years ago, when the feminist studies major was coming up for its periodic renewal, someone in a position of authority asked the program's director why Stanford even needed such a thing. Why feminist studies? Why an interdisciplinary program at all?

The program's founder, historian Estelle Freedman, was not present at that conversation, but she has an answer.

"Look at the world," said Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History. "Read the newspaper through the lens of gender. It's everywhere. Internationally, look at Iraq, look at rape, look at birth control. Domestically, the hot political issues of the day are gay marriage and abortion. Students, no matter what they end up doing in life, have to be educated."

"We wanted to be on the edge, we wanted to apply a critical, analytical perspective and explore everything through the lens of feminism," she added, referring to the program's foundations.

What is called the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford may be called something else at other universities. Some of the women's studies programs dating back to the 1970s have changed their names in recent years, usually adding "gender."

Program Director Penny Eckert, a linguist, is proud of the name here. "Feminism implies critique," she says. "Gender implies a more agnostic approach."

It also implies crossing disciplines, or at least redefining them. For Myra Strober, a labor economist and a founding director of Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), feminism is multidisciplinary, not interdisciplinary. In her mind, there are very few feminist scholars today whose work truly is interdisciplinary, integrating elements and theories of various fields to create something entirely new and autonomous. Interdisciplinarity will only happen, she said, when there is a critical mass of doctoral programs in women's studies or feminist studies.

"That's an enormous undertaking, and it's really critical that it happen," she said.

Indeed, in the 1970s, when feminist studies got off the ground, the field was dominated by the women-plus courses: Women in Art, Women in Film, Women in Engineering. Today, to quote the program's successful statement for renewal in 2003, the field embraces "explorations of how the social construction of gender perpetuates inequality ... and how gender and sexuality relate to the production and interpretation of culture."

In earlier years, the Feminist Studies Program at Stanford, like other Interdisciplinary Programs (IDPs), was subjected to the criticism that it was not sufficiently rigorous, that it was not real scholarship.

In reply, Eckert points to the quality of the program's students and teachers.

"Feminism is not simply a movement that happened and it's over," she said last fall, speaking after a yearlong sabbatical, during which time the directorship was taken over by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. "It's a continuing, evolving, philosophical and analytical tradition. You can't do that within a single major."

Eckert's own work provides a good example. She studies changes in speech sounds and pronunciation and looks at specific regions, particularly in the upper Midwest. Over the years, she figured out those changes had a lot to do with social class, but she gradually came to see that gender roles often overlay linguistic and class categories.

One of Eckert's favorite examples of great feminist scholarship is a path-breaking article that appeared in 1991 in Signs, the pioneering feminist journal, which was edited at Stanford's Center for Research on Women (IRWG's predecessor) in the 1980s. "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles" was a study of the language and narrative of reproductive biology. Assumptions of gender roles turn out not only to have influenced the way in which reproduction was described (female processes are wasteful and passive, male processes are energetic and productive) but to have missed much of the complexity of what actually goes on inside men's and women's bodies. It is the reproduction, as it were, of gender stereotypes at the cellular level.

A study like that, Eckert said, could not take place in a traditional biology department--though it might well take place in the Program in Human Biology, one of Stanford's other IDPs. Perhaps not coincidentally, a sizeable number of students in feminist studies classes come from the Human Biology Program, Freedman noted.

A similar example was offered by Strober: "Feminist economics," she said, has to be more than studying, say, women and the labor market, or women and day care, or women and salaries. Breaking through, creating that autonomous field, seemed impossible to Strober, whose disciplinary training was deeply rooted in economics. One day, however, she came across a paper by another economist, Julie Nelson, who seemed to have pulled it off. It turned out Nelson had graduate degrees in both economics and feminist studies. "So she didn't have blinders, she could think back and forth," Strober explained. She could become interdisciplinary.

Freedman, who has taught the Feminist Studies Program core course for years, asks students at the end of each quarter to fill out a questionnaire. Among other things, they are asked to complete the sentence, "What I learned in this class was...." Every year it's the same, she said. Students learn that feminism is not just one thing.

"We claim the label of 'feminist studies,' but we define it very broadly," she insisted. "This program has always been about making connections."

When asked if she would advise a student to major in history or in feminist studies, Freedman thought a minute. "If they want a methodological approach, one in which you learn about the history of the Middle Ages and the history of modern Africa, then choose history. But if you want an analytical approach, then pick feminist studies," she said.

The blurb of Freedman's most recent book, No Turning Back (Ballantine 2002), a history of feminism, refers to it as an "interdisciplinary book" (http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/december4/noturningback-124.html; http://noturningback.stanford.edu).

"I became interdisciplinary as a result of being a feminist," she said. The book relies upon a wide range of disciplines that she became familiar with through her teaching assistants (many of whom come from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature) and from colleagues at IRWG, with which the Program in Feminist Studies shares a home in Serra House. Indeed, Lunsford said one of the most exciting parts of being program director for a year was her regular meetings with IRWG's graduate fellows, who hail from a variety of disciplines.

Feminist studies' interdisciplinarity (or multidisciplinarity) goes hand-in-hand with academic rigor, the program's leaders say.

"Some people complain feminism is 'just politics,'" Freedman said. "Well, so is democracy. We're part of humanity, of humanism. All knowledge is political. We represent an analytical approach, and we won't deny our connection to politics."

"But," she said, "there is no political test in our program. Everyone who wants to teach, can."

It takes a particularly strong commitment for faculty and students to become involved with the Feminist Studies Program.

Students majoring in feminist studies are required to take an introductory class, Feminist Studies 101, seminars in methods and theory, and a "practicum," which amounts to an internship plus a follow-up senior seminar. Students have served as interns with non-governmental organizations, at the U.S. Department of Labor, in classrooms and hospitals, and with the Feminist Majority Foundation, to name a few.

All classes except 101 and the practicum are cross-listed in the Feminist Studies Program and another department. One problem Eckert pointed to is that no core faculty member's department is willing to cross-list the practicum because students in the course are, by definition, feminist studies majors, not majors in the instructor's home department. So the program has recruited a succession of instructors, who may be excellent but are not tenure-track faculty.

"We need more dedicated faculty lines," Freedman said. "There need to be rewards for faculty who teach in IDPs," she added, "some kind of course credit for starting an IDP course, or summer money, or something."

It's a small program, of course -- there were 16 graduates in 2002, 17 in 2003, and around 20 majors now -- but it is steady and popular. Some 1,000 students a year take feminist studies courses, including repeats.

Students come motivated for different reasons, and it's often hard to pin down where the interest comes from. Often it's a particular instructor or teaching assistant who draws them in. Freedman remembered a couple of years in the 1990s when a sorority member was a major, and as a result the classes suddenly were full of her sorority sisters. One year a Stanford Dolly showed up. She liked it.

This year gender makes its first appearance in the freshman Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) courses, which Freedman surmised might result in more students finding their way to Feminist Studies. One of the two relevant IHUM classes is Race, Gender, and the Arts of Survival, taught by Michele Elam of the English Department, and her husband, Harry Elam of the Drama Department.

"Basically," Michele Elam explained last fall, "the study of gender relations in the class will include examination of historically specific constructions of masculinity and femininity in literature and culture."

Reading the medieval love letters of Heloise and Abelard, Shakespeare's Othello and the memoirs of the young slave Harriet Jacobs, among other texts, students will study what Elam described as "the complex intersection of and interaction between race and gender."

Back in 1981, when the Feminist Studies Program started at Stanford, there were students whose parents would not allow them to be majors, Freedman remembered. That doesn't tend to happen anymore. Today, many students were raised by feminists, both male and female. That might make members of the faculty feel old, but it also shows that good ideas eventually, especially with the help of good university programs such as Feminist Studies, change the way we live our lives.