Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Teaching About The History Of Women In Western Music, Jane M. Bowers

Women's Studies Quarterly

In the summer of 1976, a course entitled Women Musicians and Composers in Western Europe and the United States between 1100 and the Present was offered by the Women's Studies Certificate Program in collaboration with the Department of Music at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.* Since this may have been the first course of its kind offered by any college or university, I would like to describe something of its nature, aims, and procedures; list some of the source materials that served both the students and the instructor in preparation of the course; present a selective list of recordings …

Women Artists: A Book And Slides For Classroom Use, Estelle Lauter

Women's Studies Quarterly

Karen Petersen and J. J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal From the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper and Row, 1976, 212 pp. including Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, List of Illustrations, and Index. $5.95.

Although Karen Petersen and J.J. Wilson are not trained art historians, they have gathered quantities of historical information based on extensive research into a lively narrative that is a fine tribute to their training in comparative literature, and to the feminist spirit of collective research. Besides treating each of the 22 artists covered in Eleanor Tufts' Our Hidden Heritage, the …

Control Of The Curriculum And Standards, Florence Howe

Women's Studies Quarterly

The following short excerpt from Seven Years Later: Women's Studies Programs in 1976 by Florence Howe raises questions of particular importance today. We print it here to inaugurate a series of articles on Evaluating Women's Studies. Howe's full one-hundred-page report will be available free in the fall from the National Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs, 1832 M Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Long-range, perhaps the most controversial and critical question in women's studies will concern control of the curriculum, particularly with respect to standards. That this should be a question at all suggests how quickly women's studies has achieved …

Newsbriefs, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Editorial, F. H.

Women's Studies Quarterly

Cause for Celebration. Since 1969, the Clearinghouse on Women's Studies has been recording the growth of women's studies programs in colleges and universities. Originally it was a service of the Modern Language Association's Commission on the Status of Women. Then, in 1971, the Clearinghouse became an educational project of The Feminist Press. In both cases, publishing a list of women's studies programs helped students decide where to study and told faculty where they might find jobs. But there was still another reason for publishing such lists: programs like San Diego's and Cornell's (listed in 1970) and San Francisco State's, …

Sugar And Spice: That's What Children's Books Are Still Made Of, Jeanne Bracken, Sharon Wigutoff

Women's Studies Quarterly

In April 1977, at a conference on children's literature at Columbia University, an editor from a commercial publishing house responded to feminist criticism of a book. The editor stated that children's books should be free of "issues" and should not be expected to respond to every "trend" that comes along, such as the women's movement. To reduce the decade-long struggle of the women's movement to the status of a gimmick or a fad was more than merely insulting; it was a comment that ridiculed the committed efforts of feminists to create a literature—and ultimately a society—where children can find role …

Corrections: Nwsa News, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

Three errors crept into the list of Coordinating Council members and addresses published in the Winter/Spring 1977 issues of the Women's Studies Newsletter.

Programs, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

Most of the programs listed below are interdisciplinary, i.e., they combine courses in literature, language or culture with work in sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, history, philosophy, psychology, biology, and related fields. Some programs offer minors (denoted by Min) or Certificates (denoted by Cer), others award the A.A. or the B.A. degree, still others offer the M.A. or Ph.D. Programs listed without a specific label offer a roster of elective courses. Where no Coordinator, Director, or Chairperson is listed, either the program is still in the process of organization or it has chosen to function through a committee, rather than …

Editorial, F. H.

Women's Studies Quarterly

As we go to press with the first issue of our fifth year, it is with pride in our new format and an apology for being late. Unpredictable circumstances kept us from appearing in December, and one significant decision made us delay until now.

The decision belongs to the new National Women's Studies Association: that the Women's Studies Newsletter become its official disseminator of news and information. Elsewhere in this issue we print the policies established by the Association and accepted by The Feminist Press on behalf of the Newsletter. Here we'd like to talk about our sense of …

White Woman, Black Women: Inventing An Adequate Pedagogy, Nancy Hoffman

Women's Studies Quarterly

As a white woman teaching literature written by black women for some years now, my experience has begun to make sense, to add up to some principles and some observations which may be useful to other teachers. I teach older, urban students who are or will become human service workers. We do little by way of formal literary criticism; we read literature to learn about American values, about problems of race and class, to understand the choices of characters, and to reflect on our own lives. Particularly because students work in intercultural settings, we use the classroom to approximate as …

Images Of Women In Renaissance Literature: A Selected Bibliography Of Scholarship, Elizabeth H. Hageman

Women's Studies Quarterly

This bibliography offers a representative selection of scholarship on the image of woman in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As one would expect, a large percentage of the items listed here were published in the last five or six years, but a surprising number of significant, detailed studies of woman's place in Renaissance society were written in the early decades of this century. Moreover, the 17 studies that I have listed from the 1940s and 195Os are among the most valuable of the items that appear here - both in their scholarly concern for facts and in …

The Women's Caucus For Art, Judith K. Brodsky

Women's Studies Quarterly

The Women's Caucus for Art is a national professional organization of over 1,000 women art historians, artists and curators. Historically speaking, the Caucus is of its time. Women in a number of academic societies have been establishing or have established caucuses in order to bring to bear more concerted action of their societies, chiefly to work against discrimination in the field and on improvement in the curriculum. The history of the Caucus reveals some of the intricate problems facing women in the attempt to gain equal status.

What Happened At The Convention?, Florence Howe

Women's Studies Quarterly

The founding convention of the National Women's Studies Association, organized by the San Jose State University Women's Studies Program, brought more than five hundred participants to the campus of the University of San Francisco, January 13-16, for three and one-half days—and nights—of work and some play. The convention's program was an ambitious one.

Mother Joseph, Builder And Architect, Erika Gottfried

Women's Studies Quarterly

This article is one of a series on lost women written by Erika Gottfried as part of an independent study project at the University of Washington in history and women's studies. The essay was first printed in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, August 1, 1976.

The Northwest's first architect, Mother Joseph, arrived in a wilderness that had almost none of the services and amenities available in the more settled parts of the United States. There were no hospitals, few schools and even fewer resources for the care of orphans, the aged, the destitute or the mentally ill when Mother Joseph …

Newsbriefs, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Black-Eyed Blues Connection: Teaching Black Women Ii, Michele Russell

Women's Studies Quarterly

In the first half of this essay (Fall 1976, Vol. IV, No. 4) the author described the Wayne County Community College classroom at the downtown YWCA in Detroit, her students, her role as teacher, and the ways in which she took "one subject at a time" and encouraged "storytelling. " In a subsequent issue, we will publish her annotated bibliography.

Give political value to daily life. Take aspects of what they already celebrate and enrich its meaning so they see their spontaneous tastes in a larger way than before. This means they will see themselves with new significance. It also …

Back Matter, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Nwsa News, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

CONSTITUTION OF THE NWSA

Drafted: January 13-16, 1977 at the Founding Convention held at the University of San Francisco.

PREAMBLE

We, the delegates to the first convention of the National Women's Studies Association, have met to found an organization designed to further the social, political, and professional development of women's studies throughout the country, at every educational level and in every educational setting.

Women's studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the women's liberation movement exists because women are oppressed. Women's studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of …

Women's Studies In Its Second Phase, Gayle Graham Yates

Women's Studies Quarterly

A personal statement written for tbe program at tbe University of Minnesota and presented at a brown bag lunch.

Women's studies is in its seventh year nationally, its fifth year here, at least under that title. It is appropriate to take stock now and ask why women's studies? What is it about? Where is it going?

Women's studies was born out of the women's movement, is still a child of the women's movement—the academic branch of that family. The women's movement is in what I would now call its fourth phase; women's studies is in a parallel second stage.

Women Historians And Women's History: An Organizational Guide, Arnita Jones

Women's Studies Quarterly

Since the late 1960s an interlocking network of new national, regional and local organizations has furthered the interests of women historians . From the beginning, however, the developing field of women's history has also been a primary concern. The enthusiasm of women historians for women's history has its parallel within other academic disciplines, but the current redefinition of historical inquiry to include such new areas as psycho-history, family history and the history of childhood has provided an unusual opportunity. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps out of frustration about the issue of employment, the history of women has become the major …

Review Of Women's Studies Programs Funded By Federal Government, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

At the request of the Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs, Florence Howe has agreed to write a short-range review of the current state of women's studies programs. To do that job, she and research associate Dora Janeway Odarenko will travel to 15 campuses from late September through early December 1976. They will gather specific, first-hand information on the shape and development of women's studies programs, the institutional setting and support structure of these programs and their educational goals. An essay-report of 60 pages, written after the site visits and due in Washington by the end of January 1977, will …

Women's Studies In The High Schools, Florence Howe

Women's Studies Quarterly

[This article has been adapted from the introduction to High School Feminist Studies, available from The Feminist Press for $5 plus 50¢ postage.]

The high school years are critical for the future of females and males alike, not only for what they enable students to understand about human relations between women and men and among members of families, but also for what they enable students to envision of the world of work. For many students, these are the last years of required schooling, the years preceding important choices: marriage, vocation or college. Half don't or can't choose college; and …

Images Of Women In Medieval Literature: A Selected Bibliography, Susan Schibanoff

Women's Studies Quarterly

This bibliography focuses on images of women in medieval literature rather than on medieval women writers for several reasons. First, the study of literary images of women can provide a real sense of the climate in which the individual medieval female artist might have lived, a necessary first step in evaluating her contributions. Second, the problem of identifying the authorship of anonymous medieval literary works is a large one. It is becoming apparent, however, that there were probably more good medieval women writers than those few we currently identify—Marie of France, Eleanor of Aquitane, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pisan, the …

Alice M. Lord: Labor Organizer, Erika Gottfried

Women's Studies Quarterly

[This article is one of a series on lost women written by Erika Gottfried as part of an independent study project at the University of Washington in history and women's studies. The essay was first printed in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 18, 1976.]

Probably few of Washington's workers ever have stopped to wonder who gave them their eight-hour work day. If they had, they would have learned that a large share of credit goes to one courageous woman-Alice M. Lord. Lord, who was instrumental in forming the Waitresses' Union Local 240, was the moving force behind the lobbying …

Black-Eyed Blues Connections: Teaching Black Women, Michele Russell

Women's Studies Quarterly

This is the first in a series of three segments in which this article will appear. The second half of the text will appear in the Winter 1977 issue and thlJ accompanying bibliography in the Spring 1977 issue.]

In Detroit, I am at the Downtown YWCA. Rooms on the upper floors are used by Wayne County Community College as learning centers. It is 10 a.m. and I am convening an introductory black studies class for women on Community and Identity. The 22 women who appear are all on their way from somewhere to something. This is a breather in their …

Editorial, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

As we enter our fifth year of publishing the Women's Studies Newsletter, we're confronted by an interesting paradox. On the one hand, people all over the country continue to tell us how important the Newsletter is; how wonderful, useful, crucial to the women's studies communication network and to the future of women's studies. On the other hand, although we can count more than 5,500 women's studies teachers in higher education alone (and our subscribers include libraries and public school teachers), our subscription list numbers less than 2,000. In short, we're praise-rich and subscription-poor! And while it's nice to be …

Louisa May Alcott On The Concord Centennial, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

[This report of the women's role in the Concord, Massachusetts centennial celebration is by Louisa May Alcott. It originally appeared in The Women's Journal of May 1, 1875 with the subtitle, "Unofficial Incidents Overlooked by the Reporters." We offer it in celebration of the American Bicentennial.]

Being frequently asked "what part women took in the Concord centennial celebration?" I give herewith a brief account of our share on that occasion.

We had no place in the procession, but such women as wished to hear the oration were directed to meet in the Town Hall at half-past nine, and wait there …

Grass Roots Women's Studies: Wisconsin Women In The Arts, Estella Lauter

Women's Studies Quarterly

By lucky accident, in September 1974 I saw a brochure announcing a conference to be held that October in Lacrosse, Wisconsin-a city 250 miles across the state. After I rubbed my eyes and looked again, the brochure still said that Elizabeth Janeway and Miriam Schapiro would be the featured speakers. Although I knew nothing about the brand new sponsoring organization, Wisconsin Women in the Arts (WWIA). I resolved to attend. I had assigned Janeway's book in my course that fall and I knew Schapiro by reputation, though I had never seen even a print of her painting, and I had …

Corrections: Regional Women's Studies Associates, The Feminist Press

Women's Studies Quarterly

We made a mistake in our reporting on the Northwest Women's Studies Association in our Spring 1976 issue ("Regional Women's Studies Associations," page 2). The NWSA was formally organized in January 1976 (not fall 1975) when representatives from schools in Oregon and Washington met and approved a statement of purpose and set current definitions and goals.