Seeing the World in a New Way: Rice’s Women and Gender Studies

Seeing the World in a New Way: Rice’s Women and Gender Studies

BY PHILP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff

If Rice’s Program for the Study of Women and Gender (SWG) had a motto it might be “changing the world through rigorous scholarship.” It may not be the catchiest phrase in the world of marketing, but it has the tone of truth.

Take Dana McGrath ’99. After graduating with a double major in sociology and women and gender studies, she began working as a research assistant for the Feminist Majority Foundation. The foundation is a national organization that views feminism as a global movement dedicated to equality and seeks to eliminate discrimination of all kinds.

A common stereotype of graduates with liberal arts degrees is that they have to flip burgers for a living. Flipping burgers was never in McGrath’s game plan, but she said it was the classes she took while pursuing a major in the study of women and gender that changed her life.

“It gave my passion direction and was the beginning of the path to what I now believe will be my life’s work,” she said. “These classes exposed me to some of the most theoretically complex reading of all of the classes that I took at Rice. This kind of thinking is very useful for future policy makers and other leaders as bringing things to a personal level is the first step in seeing issues in terms of the actual people they affect, rather than as just trends, statistics or ideas in a book. I grew a lot through my experiences with the program and feel very passionate about gender issues.”

The study of women and gender is in many ways all about change and seeing the world from a new perspective. Through the program, students look at the world with the scales of culture and gender removed and by asking questions based on gender, they say they see their world in new ways.

At Rice, the study of women and gender is exclusively an undergraduate program, explained Paula Sanders, associate professor of history and director of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. It is designed to take an interdisciplinary approach in exploring women’s experiences and the role that ideas about sexual differences have played in human societies. Areas of inquiry include wo-men’s participation in social and cultural production; the construction of gender roles and sexuality; the relationship between ideas about gender and concepts inherent in other social, political and legal structures; and the implications of feminist theory for philosophical and epistemological traditions.

Courses range from introductory classes about the study of women and gender to women in Chinese literature to society and sexes in modern France and to masculinities and women in music.

The newest course offering is an introduction to lesbian, gay and transgender studies, which is being offered for the first time this semester. The course has proven so popular that 28 students pre-enrolled during the fall semester, Sanders said.

“What we’re trying to make available to students at Rice is a wide range of courses from introductory to upper level—very sophisticated courses on feminist literary theory,” Sanders said. “We want students to think both broadly and deeply about women’s studies and the ways in which gender is constructed in different cultural, social and historical settings. What we’re trying to do as an undergraduate program is simply make available these courses which put women in the center and which also teach students how to think critically about sex, gender and women.”

During a lunch in Co-hen House last fall, four of the many faculty members who are deeply committed to SWG talked about their students and the program. The professors were Sanders; Lynne Huffer, professor of French studies; Susan Lurie, associate professor of English; and Elizabeth Long, associate professor of sociology.

Their conversation seemed to stray to the students who were challenging traditional ways of thinking or taking their newly acquired skills out into the world to change society in small ways for the better.

The professors agreed that the students who pursue women and gender studies are, for the most part, idealistic and socially concerned, otherwise they would not find the issues compelling. Those characteristics combined with the tools of critical thinking learned through women and gender studies seems to lead the students to want to make the world a better place.

After graduating from Rice in ’98 with a double major in religious studies and SWG, Rene Almeling took a job as a grassroots organizer with the National Abortion Federation.

The job is tough, she said, but the rigorous scholarship required by Rice’s women and gender studies major serves her in good stead every day.

“I feel very lucky that I can use the women and gender studies degree every day in the conversations that I have and the things that I write,” she said. “I feel good about what I do. For other people here, and me included, it is not just a job. We don’t make a lot of money. It is hard work, and you often have to work on the weekends. It is more a mission.”

The SWG program taught Almeling how to process information in certain ways that she says will always stay with her.

“The classes at Rice, being as small as they were, you really got a lot of intensive, interpersonal dynamics,” she said. “The teachers were excited about what they were teaching. There was a lot of flux happening, and it was good flux.”

Flux, as Almeling sees it, is the act of being open in discussion and to new ideas and ways of looking at things, people and situations.

Jeff Ostergren ’98, who majored in anthropology and SWG, said the faculty, through their teaching, affected the way he looks at everyday life whether watching television or reading a book. He cited courses in feminist social thought, women and music, feminist literary criticism and others.

“These classes really taught me how to think and see in ways that we are not brought up to [think and see],” Ostergren said. “We are, in most cases, raised in a world of various inequalities, without being able to see them. Without looking at aspects of gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, amongst other factors, it is impossible to really see the society we live in and to work for change in that society. Literally, the gender studies program at Rice has changed the way I see, the way I think, the way I am.”

One class that stands out in conversations with some SWG majors is the independent reading class conducted by Sanders. For the weekly class, she invited other faculty members to lead a discussion on their major fields of research or select topics.
“This to me is a perfect example of what higher education should be about,” McGrath said.

The origins of women’s studies at Rice can be traced back to Allen Matusow during his tenure as dean of humanities.

In 1983, Matusow, who was then dean of humanities, traveled to the Johnson Wingspread estate in Racine, Wis., to attend a conference organized by feminist scholars to raise the consciousness of administrators.

“As an American historian, I knew the impact that woman’s studies was having on my discipline, but the conference brought home to me how isolated Rice was from this current of thought,” said Matusow, the William Gaines Twyman Professor of History. “The next year I offered the first woman’s history course at this university, mainly so that I could learn the stuff. I discovered that lots of other faculty members were already engaging the field when I organized a lecture series called The New Feminist Scholarship. Gerda Lerner was the kickoff speaker. She was dynamite, and the place hasn’t been the same since.”

While dean, Matusow funded a slot in the humanities for a faculty member of women’s studies. A search committee was created to hire the first professor of women’s studies at Rice. Jane Gallop filled that position.

Elizabeth Long, associate professor of sociology, was on that first search committee and has watched the women and gender studies program grow.

The first tangible aspect of the fledgling program was a brochure listing the courses that seemed to fit the rubric of women and gender studies, she said. Then the program qualified as a minor, which was a step toward legitimization. After Gallop left Rice, Helen Longino assumed the faculty position and the directorship of the program. She pushed for and eventually won approval for the program to be named as a major. The faculty involved decided at that time that the new major should be designated as the “Program for the Study of Women and Gender.”

Most recently, Judith Brown, dean of humanities and herself a feminist scholar, gave the program office space, administrative assistance and strong moral and financial support. The bigger budget and assistance have transformed what SWG was able to do in the way of public programming, and faculty and curriculum development.

“Women and gender studies have transformed most fields in the humanities and the social sciences in fundamental ways,” Brown said. “They have done so not only because they have asked questions about previously unexamined groups in society, but also because they have altered the questions we ask about all social groups, social categories, and social attitudes. In other words, women and gender studies have altered in the most profound ways our notions about what it means to be human. Even traditional fields, such as political and diplomatic history, have had to take account of questions and modes of analysis developed by women and gender studies. At the dawn of the new millennium it is hard to imagine any first-rate college or university in the United States without women and gender studies well represented in the research of the faculty and the curriculum offered to the students.”

Next summer Professor of English Helena Michie will replace Sanders as the director of the women and gender studies program. In the past she served as acting chair and has long been active in the program.

One thing I’ve kept in mind for a long time is that I want very much to work on connecting the program to the sciences, to finding faculty in the sciences who are interested in being part of the program, to bringing in scientists from outside who work on issues of gender, to working more closely with women science students who have a very different set of epistemological and professional issues that need to be addressed,” Michie said.

There are two levels of feminist inquiry in the sciences, Michie explained. The first is professional, which asks why women are institutionally underrepresented in some of the sciences, why women are distributed among the sciences the way they are and how women and gender issues figure in laboratory cultures, for example. The second level of inquiry is more epistemological, which means gender studies challenges some scientific assumptions about objectivity and truth.

"We primarily are interested in undergraduate education. We want to design courses and programs that will appeal to and will challenge undergraduates—that is our focus,” Michie said.