 Hello, everybody. Thank you all for coming here to the Sackler Center today. My name is Rebecca Taffel. I am the director of programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. And I work with Elizabeth Sackler to provide additional programming here at the Sackler Center to the already terrific schedule of educational programs that happen here within the Brooklyn Museum. I'm thrilled to be here to welcome you all today to this panel, Building Women's Knowledge Institutions, a conversation in honor of Maryam Chamberlain. And to welcome today's panelists, Deborah Schultz, Gwendolyn Betham, and Florence Howe. Thank you to them. Thank you very much. And thank you to all of you for being here. For the past seven years, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the permanent home to the dinner party by Judy Chicago has been a vibrant exhibition, programming, and education space. As a nexus for feminist art, theory, and activism, the Sackler Center's feminist art and her story galleries display critically acclaimed exhibitions. And here in its forum is a venue for lectures, dialogue, and a platform for advocacy of women's issues. Critical to the mission is this type of active public programming related both to current exhibitions at the museum here in the Sackler Center and also to contemporary and historical feminist political and social issues. Ongoing film screenings, scholarly lectures, artist talks, performances, panel discussions, and symposia have explored wide-ranging topics from art history to sex trafficking industry to the horrors of mass incarceration. At the Sackler Center's website, you can view all of the past programs, many of the past programs. So visit www.brooklynmuseum.org slash E-A-S-C-F-A slash video. Through the dinner party, Judy Chicago sought to halt the erasure of women from history, celebrating and forever memorializing the 1,038 women commemorated within it. And here at the Sackler Center as a whole is one way that feminism has been injected to the traditional institution of an encyclopedic museum, advocating for change from the inside out. Today's panel explores this very relationship between institutions and feminism through the experiences of those who've created these institutions for social change. Dr. Deborah Schultz, today's moderator, is a historian and the author of Going South, Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. A Brooklyn native, she currently teaches US women's and modern European history at Kingsborough Community College. At KCC, she leads the Brooklyn Public Scholars Program, which is linking teaching and scholarship to local communities. She also has taught history and women's studies at the New School, Rutgers University, and LaGuardia Community College. As founder of the Soros Foundation's International Women's Program, she served for 10 years as its director of programs. Her international human rights work includes post-conflict transitional justice issues and gender justice. In her formative feminist years, she founded a women's studies program at her Brooklyn Public High School and later became assistant director of the National Council for Research on Women. Please help me welcome Deborah Schultz, who will introduce today's panelists and moderate this conversation. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for coming. First, I'd like to thank Rebecca and Jess Wilcox and the team at the Sackler Center for all the great programming that you do here. And I'd like to express particular gratitude to Elizabeth Sackler, who is the premier feminist institution builder par excellence. I saw the dinner party here when I was much younger than I am today, when it was first traveling. And I was an earnest young feminist on my way to becoming a women's historian. And it really transformed my mind as the kind of physical embodiment of the erasure of women's history that I was starting to understand. So it's really a thrill to be speaking, as always, right next door to the dinner party and always feel gratitude for the fact that it has its permanent home in Brooklyn because of Elizabeth Sackler. I'm also very thrilled. I don't know if everybody here knows that Dr. Sackler is the first woman chair of the board of the Brooklyn Museum and it's almost 200 year history. So I consider that another yes. So great moment of feminist institution building and infiltration. And we have a lot to look forward to from this institution as she goes forward. So this setting could not be more perfect for our talk about knowledge and information about women. And today we're going to focus on women's studies and research on women and honor the field with one of its founders, Florence Howe. And another founder who you may know less about but who is a dear friend of all of ours, Mariam Chamberlain, who unfortunately died last year. But we wanna share a little bit about Mariam and what she taught us. When she died, the New York Times referred to her as the fairy godmother of women's studies, which I think is actually perfect. I think Florence will tell you more about how she earned this title initially as a program officer at the Ford Foundation who had the vision to really understand what women's studies could and would become and supported it. So I'm gonna say a little bit about her background by way of introduction of Mariam and then I will introduce Florence and Gwen. So Mariam was born in 1918 to Armenian immigrant parents. She died last year just short of her 95th birthday. Overcoming her father's objection to girls' education, she eventually earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University. She loved talking about doing research with her mentor, the Nobel Prize winning economist Vasily Leontief. She also enjoyed talking about her work during World War II with the OSS, Office of Strategic Services. And some of us enjoyed thinking about the fact that she was probably a spy. But in reality, even that work exemplified Mariam's subsequent approach to women's studies. Being an unpretentious person, she did not believe you earned a doctorate to show off how brilliant you were. You earned a doctorate to learn how to use knowledge in the service of a better world. And that's a message that she transmitted to all of us who were lucky enough to work with her. On the day I met Mariam over 27 years ago, the day of my job interview at the National Council for Research on Women, the council was located at Hunter College at Roosevelt House, which was the home that Sarah Delano built for Franklin and Eleanor when they first got married. It's a double house and it's connected so she could check up on them. So it had a complex gendered history, I guess. But it was a wonderful part of Hunter's clubs and public institutions and we were fortunate to have an office on the sixth floor. So I rode upstairs in FDR's rickety little elevator that he had his wheelchair in. And not knowing what to expect, I entered a very bright office with a gigantic wooden desk much bigger than this desk and a little tiny woman sitting behind that desk and the desk was littered with papers and as we can all tell you, Mariam knew where everything was even though it didn't look that way. And I felt very welcomed by this woman, this tiny woman with a very warm smile and I got to walk through that office for six years of my working life and I feel very lucky about that. Mariam helped found the National Council for Research on Women in 1981 and served as its president for many years. When I encountered it six years after its founding, it was a network of 75 centers for research on women, some of them based at universities but others freestanding public policy centers for women. And this was completely unprecedented. It's not that long ago but I think it's hard for us to remember how unique all of these centers were. And I personally felt very lucky to have found a place to work there. So Mariam was there literally at the beginning of my life as a professional feminist occupation. I didn't know existed before then. And I was there to witness her efforts to help hundreds of people who came and sat with her at that desk, seeking advice, connections, strategy and sometimes just the experience of being listened to because Mariam was an incredible listener and she knew how to take what she heard and use it to empower people. So we are all going to talk about what we learned from her, how we applied it but for now I just wanna introduce her to you and note her wisdom, generosity and love of all kinds of people. So what we have in common is our friendship with Mariam and I feel lucky that through Mariam I got to meet these two wonderful women and hundreds of other great feminists. So now I'd like to introduce you to them. Dr. Florence Howe, author, editor, publisher and teacher is an internationally recognized leader of the modern feminist movement. She became closely involved with the women's movement after her participation in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s. Described by colleagues as the Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Women's Studies, which I love, Howe began teaching women's studies courses even before such things existed. She founded the Feminist Press which while larger publishing houses were ignoring women authors and the press published hundreds of authors. I will only name a few notable writers that you will recognize. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Agnes Medley, Kate Chopin, Tilly Olson, Grace Paley, Paula Marshall, Marilyn French, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, many of whose works had been out of print for decades. She's been a president of the Modern Language Association, has written many books and articles, contributed to many anthologies, has published essays in the Harvard Educational Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and the Women's Review of Books has written many books, the most recent of which I will recommend to you, her memoir called A Life in Motion. And maybe you'll tell us a little bit more about that. I'd also like to introduce Gwen. When I left the National Council for Research on Women to finish my doctorate, I felt I was leaving it in very good younger feminist hands with Gwen and a circle of wonderful young women who helped to take the council forward. Best of all, we shared the wonderful experience of being mentored and befriended by Mariam. And I know that Mariam was particularly proud of the way Gwen carried on the feminist knowledge tradition. So let me tell you a little bit about her accomplishments. Dr. Gwendolyn Beetham is an independent scholar living in Brooklyn, New York. She has worked for women's research institutes and international gender justice organizations and has taught gender studies at the London School of Economics, Rutgers University, and Brooklyn College. Her work has been published in various collections, journals, and online publications. She currently edits the series The Academic Feminist for Feministing.com. And I believe she'll tell us a little bit more about that. And is the co-editor of the four volume collection, Gender, Poverty, and Development. She has a PhD from the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. So let me welcome them both. Please join me in thanking them. And now we'll move on. Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. Mariam Chamberlain was my dear friend, mentor, grant giver, and colleague for 40 years. We first met in April 1971 when she called a meeting mainly of academic scholar feminists in order to map a program of giving by the Ford Foundation. She was interested in me because I mentioned that I had a list. I had names on this list. New college courses on women that faculty had begun to teach. These faculty called the courses female studies or women studies or feminist studies. Clearly, this was the way that social or political movements begin without organization or leadership. These were only mostly individual isolated outposts which because of an intrepid undergraduate at Goucher College named Carol Allam, I had on a list. Faculty had written to me because a journal called College English had published my course syllabus and my essay about the composition course focused on women writers I've been teaching since the mid sixties in order to improve the writing of my women students. I wasn't a feminist. I would not even have recognized the word in the mid sixties. But at the time of Mariam's meeting at Ford in 1971, I had information about two women studies programs and about 610 courses that had just sprung up. Magically, it seemed. When we met a few weeks after that initial meeting, Mariam said she wanted more information and she proposed that I survey all the colleges in the country and that the feminist press published the results. She offered the feminist press its first Ford grant and we all have to giggle at the size of it. It was $10,000 to produce this book, to do the survey and produce the book. That was still 1971. In 1974, the feminist press published in hardcover and in paperback, all very ugly. I must say, since one of our designers is sitting in this audience. A great designer, right? You would be horrified. But at any rate, the volume was called Who's Who and Where in Women's Studies and it listed 2,984 faculty teaching 4,658 different courses at 885 campuses. I should mention that this study was done through the US Postal Service and in my office, the editors who are Old Westbury students use note cards to assemble the information. They copied everything out in three ways by university, by title of the course, and by faculty member. And then they arranged them alphabetically and then they typed this list. There were no computers at feminist press. Remember, this is 71 to 74. No computers until 1987. So, in this volume were also listed 112 women studies programs, some of them offering majors or minors. The spurt in growth between 1971 and 1974 can only be described as phenomenal. Mariam Chamberlain used that information as a guide for her funding program that ranged through the 1970s until 1982 when she left the Ford Foundation. She, in that decade, she funded more than 30 centers for research on women, almost all of which had also a women's studies teaching component. So she was really instrumental in the growth and the institutionalization of women's studies programs that also became centers for research on women. And now I'm gonna ask the question, why did this matter? Why does it still matter today? In the 1960s, I had begun teaching a writing course at a woman's college focused on women because of a mind-bending experience in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 when I was not a feminist. I was merely interested in solving a puzzle. Why was it that poorly educated young black high school girls could write amazing poetry about being black and wanting freedom? While my white privileged goucher students could write only perfectly correct and absolutely boring essays. For a couple of years, I searched for the subject that might excite these privileged white students and when I hit on it, it seemed obvious. I asked them to talk and then write about how they and their brothers were treated in their families. And at first they said we're all treated equally. Even if they had no brothers, they said if we had brothers, we would all be treated equally. I knew that was wrong because I had a younger brother and we would never treat it equally. They were angry about this subject. They didn't wanna talk about it eventually. So I assigned them to write about it and the writing definitely improved. Then I assigned books by women to stir their imaginations further. But clearly that was not enough since I was also teaching literature courses with nary a woman writer in them. By 1969, the year I became a feminist, students who had been in my writing class could not understand why my 18th century course syllabus contained the name of not one woman writer. And they asked me whether somebody had typed this for me and had made a mistake and left the names of women writers off the list. No, I responded. I typed my own syllabus and I have to admit I continued. I don't know any 18th century women writers. They were as shocked as I was embarrassed. At about the same time, I was also conducting a huge study of 5,000 English and foreign language departments, all of them in the United States for the Modern Language Association where I chaired something called a commission on the status of women. The results were not what I had expected and I had to interpret them. Here's a bird's eye view. As undergraduates, women were 80% of the majors in all these fields, English, French, Spanish, et cetera. And men were 20%. As doctoral graduate students, the figures were neatly reversed. Men were 80% and women were 20%. How could that be? We also knew that women's grades as undergraduates were far higher than men's. And we could not blame the disparity on discrimination since women did not even apply for places in graduate programs. I'm sure you can imagine that what I was looking at was the effect of at least 100 years of such practice. All or more, the 90% of the faculty in the most prestigious colleges, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, were male. And even on elite women's college campuses, most faculty were male. What was the problem? How could I analyze these results? At first, I was simply shocked. Remember, this was still in 1979. And then, I'm sorry, it was still in 1969. So I'm shocked. Then when I put this information together with my own experience, two facts stood out. First, I had read no women writers all the time I was in college. And if not for the president of my college at Hunter, who had singled me out and helped me directly to enter graduate school, I would have become a high school English teacher. I had no other ambition and no reason to have any other ambition. Second, the curriculum in literature studies was certainly 90% male. How could female college students grasp the idea that they might become professors of literature, much less writers of literature? Clearly, they had no models at universities, nor in the literature they were reading. How could they imagine themselves as writers or professors? The feminist press was founded in 1970 almost a year before that meeting at the Ford Foundation and a year after the study that I was just talking about. And it was founded for the purpose of correcting ignorance about women, not only as writers, but as important to historical memory. We had begun with the idea of publishing brief biographies of women and children's books. The children's books is another story that if you want to hear in the question period you can ask me about. But the brief biographies of women were to supplement. I still had no idea that anything had been lost. The lost idea came about three months later when a world famous Tilly Olson sent me a brilliant novella, a short novel that had been lost for 110 years. It was famous in the day it was published in the Atlantic in 1832. Now I've got the date wrong, 62. It's called Life in the Iron Mills and it was the first reprint of feminist press published in 1971. By Rebecca Harding Davis, it had been lost for 110 years. In its day, it made that writer famous. Everyone from Nathaniel Hawthorne, right? To Emerson, everyone thought it was the best thing ever written by anybody, let alone a woman. I remember saying out loud in those years if Life in the Iron Mills had been lost for 110 years, there must be other works lost as well. And of course I was right. And the 44 year history of the feminist press makes that clear. We published about 300 lost works and then huge volumes of African works, four huge volumes with 100 or more writers in each volume. And I'm not even mentioned the Indian ones. I'm convinced further that there's still much to be found in the voices of women lost around the world. Well, to get back to Mariam. Mariam knew this story and we had for most of the 70s worked together on issues of importance to women's studies in the US. But unlike many of us, Mariam's vision in part shaped by management studies, which as an economist she had worked on through the 60s, had also been honed to think internationally. In early 1980, this is about a year after we met, she called me up to say enough of the US, please come with me to look at women's studies in three European countries, England, France and Italy. She had made several small women's studies grants to institutions in each country and she wanted to see what had happened there and what else might be done. She also knew that there was to be a UNESCO meeting on women's studies in April of that year. And though I didn't know it then, she planned to name me as the US representative. Finally, she also had plans for the United Nations meeting at Copenhagen in 1980 in the summer. As part of her funding program for women's studies, she would give the feminist press $5,000 to organize a presence at that Copenhagen conference and she would also use her influence so that the UN itself would give the feminist press another 5,000 for the same purpose. And again, $10,000 went a long way in 1980. Marion was an unusual program officer in that at least with this project, she was ready to enjoy being in part a participant, seeing the project close up. We were certainly partners as we traveled to Oxford then London, Paris and Rome to interview those who had Ford grants and others who would like to have them. Marion was not shy about stating her interests. She knew how to move movements forward. Conferences were an important instrument as were centers for networking and information gathering. And while she was somewhat disappointed for those in Britain and Paris who were indifferent to her stated interest, she saw the Italians as moving intrepidly on their own to construct networks and conferences and rewarded them so, rewarded them accordingly. Within a year, the feminist press had published a book about the kinds of women's studies the Italians were creating in combination with trade unions, very unusual work, to enhance work and study opportunities for women. Perhaps most interesting was that at the United Nations Conference in Copenhagen, Marion felt free enough to behave sometimes as a staff member might, taking her turn at the coffee machine in the meeting rooms we occupied for the two weeks of the conference and then switching gears to pick up a dinner bill at planning meetings in the evening. And finally, she hosted an end of conference party for the several hundred participants who had been speakers or audience at our 35 different sessions. One of Marion's last grants to the feminist press came out of these UN conferences. For the first five years following the meeting in Copenhagen in 1980, we were to be the partner organizer of something called an international network of women's studies, with the Center for Policy Studies in New Delhi, India serving as the other partner. We were to use the several hundred thousand dollars, this was a large grant, to visit and offer collegial services to various kinds of women's studies programs around the world. And we were to hold focused international conferences in the US and elsewhere. Marion's dream was big time and never to be realized since she was cut off when her job disappeared, but she had talked about it with me often. Though she was not a reader of fiction, which was ultimately my interest and the strength of the feminist press publishing program under me, she grasped the power of publishing as an arm of the knowledge gathering purpose of the women's research centers she had been funding for a decade. She was certainly visionary in many respects, but few people know how far her vision extended and that she certainly understood the power of publishing for women. Had she continued at Ford, I have no doubt that she would have begun to fund publishing focused especially on women's economic equality. Marion died a year and a half ago. She left a hundred thousand dollars to the feminist press, which we have turned into the Chamberlain Revolving Capital Campaign, aiming to add 200,000 more so as to provide the director of the press with a mechanism for managing a business that has never had its own capital. As an economist, Marion was especially keen all through the years she served on our board of directors after she left the Ford Foundation, that we begin a capital campaign. She knew that we needed to control debt by having some capital. And of course, once again, even in death, she helped us. If you are interested in contributing or if you would like to know more about Marion Chamberlain, please write to me. I have a website and when we did a large memorial for Marion a year and a half ago about a dozen people spoke and all of what they said is on my website. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Florence. That was wonderful. Florence has reminded us of something that Marion always said, which is that women's studies was and remains the intellectual arm of the women's movement. Yet, because we are still not used to thinking of women as intellectuals, I would argue the history of this movement is in danger of being lost. So we really are grateful to be able to share this history with you today, weaving together our personal experiences and a kind of institutional history of women's studies and research on women. So I'll continue that a little bit with my own experience. So you heard that I started a women's studies program in my high school and I was able to do that because I was benefiting from 10 years of Florence and Marion already plotting and scheming to the extent that my teacher understood that there needed to be at least one essay question about women on his final exam. And the essay question was, should American women honor Elizabeth Cady Stanton? And I didn't know who Elizabeth Cady Stanton was and that upset me. So I set about finding out who she was and once I understood that there was this whole body of knowledge that I had been kept from, I literally was on fire, which was the name of the club we started. Feminists involved in reaching equality and our publication was called Fireworks. And we had a great group of men and women teachers who supported us in creating this multi-disciplinary women's studies program in my very progressive public high school. So that was the beginning for me. And I committed to becoming a women's historian. I was a women's history major in college and in graduate school. Part of the message that I internalized, which I attributed before to Marion, was the idea that you learn things and you put them to the use of social change. And that was not really a message of my particular generation. So I was going a little bit against the grain in seeking to work in this field and you can imagine how thrilled I was to encounter by chance an ad, a job ad for the National Council for Research on Women, a place where I could finally put my extremely unpractical degree in women's history to use, Gwen understands. So when Marion interviewed me in the office that I described before, we had a conversation. It wasn't an interrogation. It was love at first sight. I was 26 and she was 69. And I think you're getting a sense of Marion whenever I talk about her, I like to emphasize the fact that she was radically egalitarian. She really just took people for who they were and she listened and she was so supportive. For me, it was very important to understand, to have Marion as a role model and to understand that one simply acquired a PhD as a woman. I didn't have any role models in my family for that and her support and her example really helped me understand that if you could get a doctorate in economics from Harvard as the child of Armenian immigrants, what did I have to complain about when there actually was women's studies? But in many ways, my six years at the National Council for Research on Women were the beginning of my graduate education and I'd like to share a little bit about what I experienced there and what I learned there because I think it does speak to Marion's strategic thinking about institutionalization. So I was very lucky and this is different than Gwen's experience because I was the only young person working there with the founding mothers of women's studies and women's research. So I got to just listen and absorb. But Marion in particular really shared her strategic thinking with me and I will be forever grateful. And particularly the kind of thinking, as Florence said, that she acquired as a program officer at the Ford Foundation and in management studies because she really understood how to create a new field where nothing existed before. So she said about mapping the field, what exists, where are the gaps? And I think here it's important to draw a distinction between women's studies and research on women because this, Marion really believed in the creation of knowledge that could be applied to press for change in public policy in the situation of women in the academy, in corporate life, political life, et cetera. And as head of ENCRO, she sought to identify and link existing centers for research on women, finding out how many there were, what was their focus, what research needs were not being met and who could address them. These are the kinds of questions that Marion was always asking. She was always quantifying and trying to find the gaps. And I was fortunate to work on some of the projects that really helped to identify what was happening and where things needed to go. So I got to work on a directory. We all worked on directories and compiled information about curriculum transformation projects around the country. And those were projects that assessed with whether college curricula were really integrating the new knowledge that was being created about women and about people of color across all the disciplines. And there was a body of knowledge developing and people with that expertise who were consulting on campuses around the country and helping colleges and universities to figure out how to do this if they had the resources and the political will to do so. And that's an important if because as I started to work at the council I understood that this was a very political moment, this effort to transform the curriculum was extremely political. And one of the things I got to do as well was to research and document the backlash against this kind of inclusion of women and people of color in higher education. And the council published a report called to reclaim a legacy of diversity analyzing the political correctness debates in higher education in America. We know that the cliche that knowledge is power but only when I began to research and trace millions of dollars that right wing think tanks were investing in attacking the idea of expanding the canon as the feminist press did. Did I understand that a lot was at stake in this effort to be inclusive? When chairs of the National Endowment for the Humanities like William Bennett under Ronald Reagan and Lynn Cheney under President George H. W. Bush attacked the new scholarship on women as shoddy and compensatory victim studies we knew that we had to go on the offensive. And because we could never marshal the kind of funding given to those right wing think tanks we had to leverage our funding and networks very strategically. And that was something that Mariam was great at doing. NCRO built alliances and held conferences that brought together academics, activists and policymakers to think about how to impact actual issues affecting the lives of women. For example, the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University not only documented the extremely dispiriting numbers of women in political office but also did research that helped us understand what supported women in running for office. A place like the Washington DC based Institute for Women's Policy Research conducted new research designed to affect national debates and legislation about pay equity and work family leave, for example. Other member centers like the Women's Research and Resource Center at Spelman College created new knowledge about African American women and channeled that back into scholarship and teaching. But as Florence mentioned, both she and Mariam were extremely visionary in thinking about women's studies and research on women at a global level long before globalization was a framework that we were used to thinking in. So when I was at NCRO, I had the privilege of working with Mariam to bring international scholars to the US to study what we were doing here in the US, not to copy it but to understand what was possible and to give them the space to think about what would be relevant in their own contexts. So I had many wonderful experiences with international scholars but to stand out in particular that I'd like to share. I had the opportunity to design a study tour for South African academics who wanted to learn about affirmative action, gender studies and curriculum integration. And because we had many things in common, obviously about the challenges of racism, there was a lot of resonance there. But it did require thinking systematically about higher education as an institution in the US and South Africa. And I was very grateful even though I was young at that time that Mariam gave me the opportunity to really take this project forward and run with it. The second opportunity that I had was to work with the first post-Soviet gender studies scholars. So I organized a study tour for Anastasia Posadskaya who was the head of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies which was created right after the fall of the Soviet Union. And that was a lot more challenging, very different historical experience. I was invited to go to Russia in 1992 to one of the first forums about gender studies and women's issues in Russia. And I began to understand how a particular kind of forced equality that Soviet women had experienced traumatized them and made it even more important for them to have their own space to understand what feminism and women studies could mean for them. And of course, Mariam was there understanding that they in particular needed their own institution and she helped support something called the Network of East West Women which promoted dialogue between women in the US and the former Soviet Union that seeded a lot of these efforts. So I got to watch that and understand that which was great preparation for me when I was asked to help start the first international women's program with Anastasia Posadskaya at the Soros Foundation. And I was very happy to be following in Mariam's footsteps as a funder, the great privilege of giving out those small grants. But we in that program really were not operating in a traditional format so it was really a lot about convening and working with women in their own locations to understand what they wanted to do. So I'd just like to conclude by sharing some experiences and the lessons that I learned about institution building from ENCRO and Mariam as kind of overarching principles. So first thing, convene women and let them debate, design and decide what works for them. I'm also pleased that the Soros Foundation valued local knowledge so they supported local leadership to do this. So we convened in 1997 about 50 women from the 30 countries that the Soros Foundation was working in in Poland in the dead of winter to talk about building a network to really understand what they wanted to do, what would be relevant for them. That's okay. And what they decided were to prioritize the following issues, violence against women, trafficking in women, which was a tremendously important issue for the post-Soviet region, the portrayal of women in the media and the newly emerging gender studies. I was able to be part of an effort to organize two groundbreaking conferences, the first regional gender studies conference in the former Soviet Union that brought women together from around 50 countries in Belgrade, Yugoslavia when Slobodan Milosevic was still president and NATO was about to bomb Serbia. So that was a challenging experience. It was great. And then also the following year to help organize the first women's history conference in post-Soviet space that took place in Minsk, Belarus, a totalitarian state still very poor and the country from which my grandmother fled a hundred years earlier. So that was very significant for me personally. And it was great to collaborate with scholars already building things on the ground in all of these countries, particularly brilliant in thinking about how you create bridges across ethnic differences, particularly in the Balkans in the former Yugoslavia where they were working in rapidly changing political situations. Another lesson from Mariam that I was able to put to use, if you want your women's programs to be truly inclusive, you have to challenge everyone to look at their biases but also be willing to do the unglamorous groundwork. So at ENCRO it was Mariam, little five foot one, very white woman who really did a lot of the work to finish a volume that was called at the time the unfortunate title, mainstreaming minority women's studies. But that became a very important catalyst for understanding that we didn't only have to look at the inclusion of women, we needed to start thinking intersectionally about race, class, and gender. And from that experience I was able to take what I learned and at the Soros Foundation focus particularly on a group of women I encountered in that region who were particularly marginalized for historic reasons, Roma women, who you may know as Gypsies, people who were still struggling to even be heard by their societies and by this region. And I noticed that although the foundation was very much supportive of a new generation of activists who in some ways were starting to think like the civil rights activists that we had in the 50s, although there were many young women involved in this they were never in the leadership positions. So I helped start an initiative where they could develop their own leadership skills, develop their own organizations. And I'm very pleased to say that a number of them are also pursuing doctorates and defining their own sense of what Romani feminism and Romani gender studies will look like in the 21st century. But in order to do that, I'm remembering Mariam's kind of quiet stubbornness but also ability to work at all the different levels. So that effort required working with grassroots activists, working with grassroots organizations in all of the 30 countries that we worked in, the Soros National Foundations, the Soros Foundation Leadership, the European Union, the World Bank Policymakers, our feminist colleagues and involving many different kinds of strategies and discourses to get people on board. And I'm proud that I was part of a paradigm shift on that issue. So I'm going to end right now by just bringing it back home to Brooklyn from whence I emerged and where I've returned to teach history at our local community college, Kingsborough, which has a student body of representing 140 nationalities. So while the two experiences I just described, working at the National Council for Research on Women and at the Soros Foundation enabled me to become a globetrotting professional feminist, I'm very happy to be thinking globally but acting locally here in my beloved borough, to be at the Brooklyn Museum knowing that Elizabeth Sackler is at the helm of the board. All of this feels very meaningful and correct and it's a particularly great comfort to know that there's a generation of feminist scholars who have come up behind me and I'm really looking forward to hearing from Gwen Beatham. Thank you for coming today and letting us share our experiences. Hi everyone. Florence, you might be excited to see these. I actually have no cards. I'm going really old school today in honor of Maryam. And I'm so glad, thank you both so much for your really amazing and detailed backgrounds. I feel this sort of overwhelming sort of swell of happiness every time I think about the lineage that I come from and the lineage that brought me here and what it really felt like for me to come to Encro. I had just finished my master's in gender at the London School of Economics when I came to Encro. I was 25 and Maryam was 85. And you might think of this as an unlikely friendship but from what you've heard so far you can kind of see that Maryam was pretty open-minded and I knew these two have heard this before so forgive me. I knew that we were going to be friends the day she asked me to teach her how to Google. And so I sat down at her computer and I sat there with her and I said, okay Maryam, we're gonna Google. We're going to Google you. And she was like, okay, I don't really know what that means. So I type her name in and all of these things come up and she's just like, oh my God, how did that get there? I was like, you know, Maryam, this is the internet. This is what's happening. And the next question she asked me without skipping a beat, she asked me this name, the name of a man. And I said, you know, Maryam, I don't know who that is. Who is that? And she said, that's my ex. And that's what I knew. She really knew what it was all about because who do we Google about our ex? So shortly after, you know, we were tight. We became very good friends. And you know, as everyone has described, especially Deborah, she was absolutely responsive to younger people, which was for me, incredibly important because there was a feeling that I wasn't always taken seriously by older people in the movement. And Maryam was never like that. She was always open. She was always responsive. She always really wanted to know what was going on and not in a kind of disconnected way or in a way that felt like, she was just asking because she felt like she had to, but she genuinely wanted to know what was going on. And I think that's really key for how she lived her life. Deborah called it egalitarian feminism. And, but I just really think of it more of a larger, a feminist way of being in the world that she really encapsulated for me and something that I also, you know, really strive to live by in my work, in my life. So I wanna talk about a couple of ways, you know, that said, you know, the things that I loved about Maryam. There were some differences that we had. So I wanna talk about a couple of the really differences in our perspective that, you know, a lot of it came from the wide generational golf, right? I was 25 when we met. She was 85, so that's a pretty big golf as open-minded as she was. But I also wanna talk about an overarching similarity that we had in the perspective that we took on the kind of work that knowledge institutions do. And that is, you know, really building these bridges between feminist activists and policy work and the work that's coming out of academia. And this is something that's been a huge part of my life since I was at the council 10 years ago to today. So, so just starting out with, I think, you know, strangely enough, one of the large kind of differences that Maryam and I had in our lives was women and gender studies. You know, I'm a women and gender studies baby. I came through, I found feminism through women and gender studies, not, you know, as a result of activism, not as a result of really pushing in the way that Maryam did, but through a course. And I think that really shaped the way that I came to feminism in a way that I think Maryam didn't always get, even as open as she was to understanding it. And I also wonder what she would have thought of, and, you know, based on various conversations that I had with her around this, what she actually would have thought of what women and gender studies became because it's very different than incorporating women into the curriculum, incorporating them into history, for example, literature, and taking a feminist or gender lens to economics, then it is to have, for example, a women and gender studies program of the kind that I come from. So gender studies as a field. I think that she had some questions about that. And I, now having finished, have questions about as well, that hopefully we'll be able to discuss a little bit in the discussion section. I don't wanna go into that too much right now, but just to say, I do think that there are some differences between the important work that Maryam did, the necessary work to bring these perspectives that had been marginalized for so long into being versus what is happening now. Not that it's not good work at all, but I think there are different projects that are happening that I think is worth talking about. The second thing is the online work that I have done, and that has been such a part of my feminism. So when I got to the council, it was 2004, which was really the beginning of the feminist blog movement. And so I was kind of there at the start of that, which is now old, I mean, I guess it's a decade old, which feels a little weird. But it's interesting because I taught Maryam how to Google. So it wasn't something that she was necessarily that familiar with, although she did love to email, she was good at it, and she emailed me often. She was part of lots of listeners and very engaged in what was going on online. But some of the work that was being done there, which is the majority of the work of my generation, just wasn't visible to her. Maryam, she subscribed to newsletters. She got the paper in the mail and that's how she understood what was happening in feminist movements. And so when she would ask me, and I would tell her what was going on and these things that we were doing, she was kind of, I would sometimes actually print things out for her, print a website out and show it to her because it seemed, I think, realer to her when she could see it that way. And I think, and I wanna focus on this a bit more in the discussion and also right now in terms of the connections that this online work and institution building has, because online work still, and online feminist activism still, is at this very initial stage in terms of institutionalization. So it's still done sort of very seat of the pants for the most part. It's still done in these ways, kind of how Florence was describing how women's studies started. There were all these courses, there were all these things all over the place, but nothing really centralized and no sort of background institutionalization or institutional funding for these organizations. And this has a really big impact on feminist activism today. And there are folks who are starting to work on this in a more substantial way that I wanna talk about, including a project called FEM Future that was started by four feminists who have been working in the online feminist world for a while as well as the Barnard Center for Research on Women up at Columbia. And there are also a couple of scholars who are working on the impact of online activism and really looking at it. The way that Florence described, we need to have these kinds of qualitative and quantitative data that we can bring to people and say, look, this is the impact of how this, this is real, this is the way that this activism is impacting the world and you should fund us. So a little bit of that is happening. There's a scholar also at Columbia, something like that. A teacher's college named Tara Conley and she does a lot of work on the impact of online activism. And I'll tell you one example of that in case, because I feel like folks still wonder what really is the impact of online activism, folks of a certain generation, I guess. And part of Tara Conley's work, she looked at the impact that online activism had on the case of Renisha McBride. And if you don't know who that is, she was a young woman, 19 years old, who was shot and killed on the porch of a man outside Detroit around this time last year. She was a black woman and she was seeking help for her car that was, she had some car issues and she was seeking help and she was shot. So online organizing, so Tara Conley's study focused on looking at Twitter, looking at Facebook, looking at other social media forums and really taking stock of that and seeing how increases in social media exposure led to not only coverage on the national level, so going from this very localized regional issue to something that was really nationally covered as well as perhaps decreasing the amount of time it took for them to bring charges against the perpetrator who was later actually convicted. So that's one example. Another great example that I like to use and I use in class as well is the Komen Foundation. Does anyone remember the Komen Foundation debacle? So the Komen Foundation is a breast cancer, primarily a foundation, and they're responsible for all the pink stuff. Isn't this month, is it this month? Yeah, so yeah, they're the pink people. And early 2012, they announced that they were gonna defund Planned Parenthood and there was such a large outcry online that not only did they reverse their decision in three days, but Planned Parenthood got three million extra dollars in donations. By the way, the initial Komen Foundation grant was only for 600,000, so they actually got extra money from this, and that was, I would say, solely as a result of online activism. And if you think about that in thinking about back before online activism was possible, I mean, we would have still been organizing a rally on against the Komen Foundation three days later and it had in fact changed the entire discourse. So I think there are things like that that really show the power of that kind of activism and the potential and the need really for that kind of work to be funded. Because again, the problem right now is that we don't have the institutional capacity so that when things like that happen, it's always, well, not always, but primarily reactive. So it'll be reacting to a particular situation because there just isn't the sustainable structure in place to be really proactive. And I think that's what we need really in the movement today. And I'm again happy to talk about this more in the discussion session. And I mean, I really wanna say again, and I think this links to the online portion rather nicely is that again, much of my work from the early days of being involved in feminist blogging and now I run a column called the Academic Feminist on the blog feministing.com. I also do some editing for the blog University of Venus on the website Inside Higher Ed. And all of that work is really about making those connections again between what's happening in academia and what's happening in the activist and policy world and that really key bridge work that I think Mariam realized was so critical when she was at the Ford Foundation and then later when she founded the National Council for Research on Women, that was the reason why she did that work was because she wanted to see those bridges being built. And recognizing that what you did with that work and I think and I hope that I'm always living in a way that as Deborah said, Mariam believed that you got a PhD so because you used it for social change and that is definitely my, the reason that I got a PhD and the way that I like to live my life as a PhD in gender studies. And I certainly hope that Mariam would approve. So thank you so much. Thank you both and thank you everyone. We'll be happy to take a couple of minutes to hear from you as well as see if we have any questions and have a conversation and maybe have a conversation among ourselves before we conclude. So why don't we take a minute and open up to you and hear about your experience. Yes. Great. I'm really excited to be here at my name's Diane Barrow and I was involved developing the earliest Women's Studies programs and I had a Ford Foundation transformation project in the early 70s I guess and I've been on panels with Florence. I'm sure you don't remember me. I do remember you. I had the NLA and the National Women's Studies Association about developing Women's Studies programs on the community college campus and Ford Foundation in fact used my program as a model for community colleges across the country. And things were pretty dire back then as Florence said and I had a master's at that point in English from Berkeley and I realized I didn't know very many women writers outside of Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. So at a certain point I decided to renew my education. My students really were asking for more information about women and women writers. There were no PhDs in Women's Studies at that time but the University of California and Santa Cruz had a program called the History of Contrustness for School of Scholar. Sure scholars. Still scholars. So I've been teaching college for 15 years at that point in France as well as in Holland and the United States. In fact, my first teaching job was here at New York City Community College on the Mason Avenue. So anyway, I was trying to do this and the faculty and the administration really didn't want this to happen. Gender or ethics studies, materials. You didn't even call of that. Just let's put some more women black and third world people. So I got this Ford Foundation Transformation Grant and we're so encouraging. The president of my college, a man, did not want to accept it. And I didn't know that he buried the acceptance of the grant offer on his desk somewhere. And the Ford Foundation president, I don't remember his name, he called and he said, doesn't your college want our, I think it was $16,000. And I told him about the sexist environment in which I worked. And he said, I will call your president and I'll invite him to lunch at the Ford Foundation. And he did and he talked to him and said we got to run that program. So it's really exciting to be, I met Gwendolyn this weekend at Douglas College which is the only public women's college in the United States. And they gave me a Lifetime Achievement Award, I'm just bragging. For my work with women's rights and incorporating women's studies in the curriculum. And then in recent years, I've been working in Afghanistan with women's rights programs and we developed, helped the Afghan women develop a declaration of Afghan women's rights parts of which got written into their new constitution. Of course implementing it is another story. So I feel like we've come full circle of me being here and I'm so happy and proud that the younger energy and generation are continuing our work. So thank you for the question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Would anybody else like to make a comment or ask a question? Yes. It is but when I was first teaching sex discrimination law in law schools, it was called sex discrimination law. Now it's called gender discrimination and the same seems to be, seems to have it in women's studies, gender studies. So what caused that change and do you think it's a good change and what is the difference between women's studies and gender studies? I mean I can see on the surface you know you have to add men's studies to women's studies. Maybe you get genders, I don't know. But what do you think about it because in some ways it seems to me that it's going in different directions than we would really want it to go. Well, the problem is that most people are pretty ignorant about language. So they're confused. Sex describes biology, gender describes social conditioning. Right. So the two words are really quite different. And they're not, I mean a few, very few people understand that they're very different. So they mush them together. When women's studies first began, it was inevitable that whatever course you went into, people were talking not only about women but about men. In fact, we had no books to begin with. The books we used were books by men and we were examining sexism in those books. And we of course always studied men as well as women. We didn't have that word gender to begin with. It took the sociologists and the political scientists to push the word gender into our conversation because they were concerned with power and power is a function of gender. So you have to go through this whole explanation for most people and it's now current, I mean even in the New York Times, the usage is very confused and mostly hit or miss that people use the words interchangeably when they really shouldn't. And I miss that man who used to write the column in the New York Times. I can't think of his name of course. Saffar, remember Saffar? He would write column after column about dumb stuff like this. I wish there was somebody else doing it. Gwen. The Gender Studies Ph.G. Yeah. Yeah, there has been so much debate on this in the field for years. And I agree with Florence. Part of the difficulty is that people confuse the terminology. I mean also when I worked at the UN, that might have not, I also worked at the UN for a while. When I worked there, people often confused sex and gender or if you were talking about gender, people would automatically think you were only talking about women. The gender default is women. Sort of like how only black people have race. White people don't have race. It's sort of like men don't have gender. So I mean that's always a miscommunication and a problem but what Florence said that's really important I think is the power element. And you know that's really what we, I think that's central to a gender studies analysis. But also I think for me conceptually, the reason why I like to use that term or why I think that term is important is because of all that it can encompass. So I mean especially in the law, the situation of looking at the legal aspect of things and I would imagine that that opens the way for discrimination against transgender people and it opens the way for discriminant, like there's just this wider lens through which you can look. And but I do, at the same time I do understand and I don't know how much we want to get into this but I mean I think it's, oh I will say it's interesting in the context of Marianne because Marianne towards the end of her life especially was like constantly on the hunt for men. She was like, where are the men? Tell me about the men, what are they doing? And so we would always have conversations about men and feminism and what was going on and did gender as a terminology help to attract more men to the cause. She really thought that it was the missing link and I think in a way that she's right and I think in a way it has been a serious, it's been one of the, I won't say failures but it's been one thing that's been really overlooked in mainstream feminist movements until now is the participation of men and really all genders I would say just opening up that terminology is really useful. I'll tell you a funny story about men and women study. I was on the West Coast after my memoir was published and I was at the University of California in Santa Barbara where there's a new women's studies program in a doctoral program and it's called Women's Studies or maybe it's even called Women and Gender Studies and the director had just had a petition to have the name changed to Feminist Studies and she told me about it and I said that's so extraordinary. No program even at the BA level had called itself Feminist Studies except Stanford. From the beginning it was all women studies and then it became women and gender studies. So I said, why do you have this petition? Who is it from? She said, we have a lot of men in our program who are doing PhDs maybe as many as 10 and they are objecting to getting a PhD in something called Women Studies or even Women and Gender Studies. They want their PhD to be in Feminist Studies. I said, do you have any objection to this? She said, no, but it's really gonna be hard to get it through the university. But you can understand men wanting a different word and they were doing doctoral, they were writing theses. Well, I also think it's interesting, again, I think there's a debate in the Women and Gender Studies community and that I noticed last year at the National Women's Studies Association Conference there was actually a debate on gender studies people doing gender studies and not being feminist, like not having a feminist analysis, that was an actual debate. And I think it's really important. Yeah, no, it's totally bizarre, I can't imagine. But again, at the UN, there were plenty of people doing gender work who were not in no way a feminist. And I think that is part of the fear, perhaps, of what in the world would they do? I don't know, exactly, I have no idea. But I think to make it clear, to say this is feminist is like, that's smart, that's awesome. Actually, and they did end up changing the name, yeah. I'll just jump in and say that I think gender conceptually is a much more sophisticated way of looking at issues of power and I'll just share that the best student in my US women's history class last year was a young man from Egypt who was fabulous. But I've also had experiences of being in institutions to see that whatever we call them, women's issues, women's programs, women's anything, things that have women running them are grossly underfunded. And I was at an event not too long ago where someone who's been a really long time, wonderful grassroots activists both in the US and at the international level at the UN said to me, the category of women is disappearing. And then she was frustrated with that for the resource and political reasons. So I think it's still an ongoing debate and I really thank you for bringing up that question because I was about to throw it at Florence and Gwen anyway. So ongoing issue and we have to pay attention. Anybody else like to bring up? The whole thing about trans really brings us all to the core. And you have trans people saying, for example, you're not allowed to say that abortion is a women's issue. Well, come on, abortion is a women's issue. It starts to get a little silly, you know? So it's going off into all these directions that are very interesting. Well, I mean, I think at the same time as we understand, like I agree with Deb's point that there are these difficulties with funding. And yes, women's gender studies programs or feminist studies or whatever we choose to call them are still severely underfunded. And I think we need to recognize that. However, I don't understand why we always feel like we have to be fighting for the little piece of the pie that is there instead of working collaboratively and collectively with other people. Why we have to continue to alienate ourselves and say, no, we only work on this issue. No, we are not capable of recognizing that trans people deal with abortion in particular ways. Why we are not able to recognize these kinds of things. I mean, I think that would only make us stronger as a group to work in this way in a more collaborative form. Yes, sir. Yeah. Hi. In that vein, are there unique ways in which the internet is being used in feminist practices that are unique? And the second question is, given the mass of the internet, are there projects which preserve that voice in ways that it won't be lost, of course, pressed in ways that the feminist press had to deal with? I think that's, yeah, thank you for that question, because I think it's great. I think this is the point that I was trying to work backwards on your question. I think this is the point that I was trying to make with funding and sustainability for these kinds of projects, because, yeah, we don't want it to get lost. Because this is where the bulk of the work is happening now for feminist movements, if we don't have some sort of archival process. And there are folks who are starting to work on this. But again, I really think that we need funding in order to make it really actually sustainable, because things get lost in the internet. So they just evaporate. So to have some sort of repository for this kind of work, so that we can have it. I mean, the Sackler has been great. They have this sort of online cache. This panel is going to be there for as long as we can access those kinds of videos, I guess. And I think that's really an important point in terms of archival work, as well as the need for the institutional support to do that. Specifically feminist ways. I mean, I think, yes. And I also want to point out that women 18 to 29 are what the Pew Foundation calls power users of the internet and social media. So they're the ones who are doing the bulk of this kind of social justice work online. And not all of it, I think, is feminist. But I think quite a bit of it could be considered feminist. And I think it also begs the question, I think. And maybe we can talk about this is one of the questions that you had given us to consider for the panel was relationships between women's studies and political empowerment. And I think it asked us to broaden what we mean when we talk about political empowerment. Because I think many of those young women consider what they do online to be politically empowering. And it's not necessarily what we think of in the first instance in most of the mainstream definitions of political empowerment. So just kind of rethinking those things as well. Any other comments or questions? I actually thought that we would end, I wanted to ask you both, what your ultimate hope and fantasy is for women's slash gender slash studies, whatever we want to call it, feminist studies for the 21st century. Just a thought. And then we will end. Thanks for doing this. A huge question. I mean, I can give a thought while I'll let Florence think. I mean, I really like to think about broadening these connections again with policy and activist work. And I mean, that really is the foundation. For me, that is the foundation of that's where women's studies came from, right? Not for me because I learned about feminism in a women's studies class, or an agenda studies class. But this notion of the two being inextricably linked, I think I would want to continue to see that grow. And where it has sort of gone away, kind of maybe come back and be strengthened a bit, because I do think, which we didn't get a chance to talk about, but I would love to talk to anybody about. I don't have a website, but I'm on Twitter, at GwendolynB. And it's this idea of what gets lost in the institutionalization process. And I think as women's gender studies and feminist studies has become institutionalized, it has lost some of its activist roots. And I would like to see those rekindled. And I think that the online space that provides an excellent way to do that. So find online work. I don't know. I started a website mostly fueled by Marion's death and fueled in the beginning by my publisher telling me that if you want to sell books, you have to have a website. And I mean, as I'm 85 years old, and I have this website, sometimes I write. I mean, I write. I don't even have a website. I write blogs. I have probably written in three years. It's been three years that I've had this thing, maybe four years. I've probably written 60 or 70 blogs. And they're all posted. I wish some of them could go away or go away. I'll help you, but they're just there. And the person who does this, I have no idea how they get there. I write something, send it to my wonderful person who lives in Ohio now. And she puts it up along with pictures. And I mean, my idea is that maybe several people or hundreds of people who have blogs would be connected in some way. And of course, there are people who write to me from time to time who either have blogs or haven't got blogs. I don't really know. And when I try to answer them, that doesn't really work well either. So I'm at 85. I need some lessons from younger people about how to turn my blog into something that's more useful instead of being a place where I write just whatever I feel like writing. And sometimes I write about depression, which I'm now being convinced it's not depression, it's sadness. If you ever think about the difference between depression and sadness, I have to write a blog about that that somebody has just told me. At any rate, I don't know the answer to your question. I don't know what's going to come next. I really worry about all the women in the world who don't even get to school or haven't ever gone to school and how we're ever going to fix that. So we shouldn't leave on such a downfall. No, we won't. We won't. Yes. I, too, have a blog that I never write in. So it doesn't matter. As I was listening to you both, actually, and of course, I share those concerns. I think about the fact that both Gwen and I have had the opportunity to work at the international level, at the United Nations. So we talked about language and conceptualization. So I'm going to leave us with a new concept that I really feel has been put on the table at the international level. And it's a vision for where we're going. So let's just end there with the idea that we're all working towards gender justice. And I want to thank you all for coming today. And thank you all very much.