MILESTONES 1 USM Women’s Studies celebrates its silver anniversary BY ALEX IRVINE

This is a lively time for women’s studies at USM. Enrollments are up and interest is high. Professor Wendy Chapkis attributes this resurgence at least in part to the current occupant of the White House. "Young women have been noticing that things that they thought were absolutely safe, like reproductive rights," can no longer be taken for granted in the midst of right-wing backlash, she says, adding that "also queer students on campus are increasingly mobilized as LGBT people are targeted, and Buster the Bunny gets censored, and all that."

Even men are getting involved. "Young straight guys are increasingly taking my classes and raising issues about how masculinity is being mobilized to encourage young men to become soldiers," Chapkis says. "I have more men in my upper-level women’s studies classes than ever."

This would have been hard to envision at the time of the program’s inception during the 1980-81 academic year, when brand-new USM women’s studies courses were the first such offerings in northern New England. The pioneer’s life is never simple, as English professor Nancy Gish—"the only person," in her words, "who’s been in this continuously from the beginning"—recalls, but the university leadership was open to her ideas from the beginning. "What happened was that when I arrived, a notice was sent around that Bob Woodbury, who was then the president, was going to appoint a committee on what was called ‘the changing roles of women and men,’" she recalls. "I called the president’s office and said I would love to be on that committee, and they put me on it." The committee did the original planning and put the nascent program in a converted Luther Bonney Hall bathroom.

"It was a one-seater, and we contemplated putting a geranium there, but they did take it out for us," Gish laughs. "The room was about big enough to have a foot of space around the table that I worked at."

Things moved fast after that. "We had a wonderful combination of many committed faculty women, many eager students, and a very supportive administration," Gish says. "We didn’t have money, space, any of those things." Another thing they had as years went on was a growing number of older women students coming back to school who were more aggressively interested in growing the program, as well as the university’s yearly convocation on the changing roles of women and men. "The convocation was a major thing that Bob Woodbury initiated," Gish says, and it’s ongoing, with prominent speakers. The first keynote speaker was Ellen Goodman, in 1982-83; after that convocation the program began to take off.

"We constructed a women’s studies program which has always been separate from departments and colleges and has reported to the provost," Gish says, although before it became a freestanding major in 1997-98, women’s studies degrees had to be approved by the College of Arts and Sciences. That was when they began to hire faculty specifically to teach women’s studies courses; the first two were Chapkis and current department chair Susan Feiner, who are tenured jointly in women’s studies and their other departments. Before that, professors who wanted to teach women’s studies courses had to work out arrangements with their departments to share their teaching loads. Even now, most of the women’s studies faculty teaches a variety of courses in other departments, an arrangement that suits the mission of the program, which according to Feiner is "about infusing gender issues into the university curriculum."

Gish picks up this thread when talking about her long involvement with women’s studies at USM. Typically women’s studies programs either become regular departments or form as a network of professors across the curriculum, who each teach cross-listed courses. This second path is known as infusion. Gish and the other early movers and shakers decided to get the best of both worlds by creating a department outside of the USM college structure. "We believe," Gish says, "that if it were in a college, it would limit the ability of women from other colleges to participate, and it would limit our ability to be genuinely interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary." USM women’s studies reports directly to the provost, and has many more joint appointments than full-time department faculty.

"The point that we made was that in order to study women, there had to be an intellectual and physical place where women were specifically studied, and that infusion would grow out of that and be part of that," Gish recalls. Now courses are offered both within women’s studies and cross-listed with a number of other disciplines. "I would say most of the CAS departments" have some course offerings cross-listed with women’s studies, Gish says, in marked contrast to her arrival in 1980. At that time, she says, "there was no set of regular women’s studies courses...one of the things that I was very aware of was that if I looked at syllabi across the university, they would not include women writers."

Next on the agenda is the expansion of USM women’s studies to include a master’s program, which—like the original undergrad offerings in 1980-81—would be the first in northern New England. After five years of planning work, the proposal to create this program is before the provost, and both Feiner and Gish sound optimistic about it. Gish hopes to begin offering graduate courses within a couple of years, followed by a full program a few more years down the line (if the Legislature will fund it). The idea, as with the undergrad department, is to provide a core curriculum while requiring students to flesh out their schedules with cross-listed courses from a number of other departments. Two tracks are envisioned, one geared toward training policymakers and administrators and the other toward writers, journalists, and educators.

Expanding the women’s studies program, Gish believes, "genuinely is central to the vision of the university as committed to an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary future, and also to commitments to diversity and new kinds of research."

Chapkis agrees. "This is hopefully the beginning of increased graduate offerings at USM," she says. "Since no one else [in the region] is offering an MA in women’s studies, it would obviously be a good addition."

But before getting down the business of graduate education, the women’s studies program will take time out to celebrate. On March 11, the program is hosting a panel discussion, "Activism and the Future of Feminism in the Academy," at the Portland Museum of Art. Panelists will include faculty, current students (including Sonia Acevedo of local ‘zine WT Chronicles), and alumna Nancy Foss of the Abortion Access Project. A party, called GenderFunk, will follow at SPACE, featuring DJ "popgirl23" and local girls’ hip-hop troupe Say It Loud.

"We hope a lot of people will come celebrate with us," Chapkis says, looking forward to blowing off some steam before digging back into what it means to be women and men in these strange times we live in.