Back to the Table of Contents Page

Back to the Weekly Home Page

Classifieds

Palo Alto Online

Feminist Studies outlives critics' barbs

by Bill D'Agostino

Before she graduated with a degree in Feminist Studies, feminism saved Noelle Stout's life.

Stout, a 1998 Stanford graduate, said her mother was trapped in an abusive relationship. Seeking some sort of solace, her mother read early feminist writers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and found the strength to take herself and her young daughter out of that dangerous situation.

Stout, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood, said her mother and other women engaged in the "feminism of survival," which kept them going even though they couldn't fully articulate their experiences. Going to Stanford and majoring in Feminist Studies gave Stout a better language to describe the injustices she saw in the world and understand her personal life.

Last week, the undergraduate program celebrated its 20th anniversary by holding a reunion that brought back many of the program's alumnae to discuss how feminism is still important in their post-Stanford lives.

Stout, for example, now teaches Women's Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and Ethnic Studies at Foothill and Skyline Colleges, creating still more ripples in the ocean of feminism's influence.

"Education really changes people, it really changes their lives," Stout said, thinking of her own transformation as well as her students. She noted that some of her students, who were anorexic, began to eat again as they recognized the cultural, political, and personal forces behind their desires to be skinny.

Since the department at Stanford was founded in the early '80s, more than 120 people have graduated with degrees in the program. Almost all of them are politically active. A number of them have become teachers like Stout. Some have brought feminism into the arts, becoming choreographers, filmmakers, or writers. And many are directly involved in the political process, working for nonprofits or serving in government.

A few are even scientists, such as Laura Kay, a 1982 graduate who now teaches astronomy at Barnard College. Kay said although her research with heavenly bodies is not directly related feminism per se, she still uses some of the ideas and ideals she learned through her mentoring of other up-and-coming female scientists.

She also teaches a course on the history and politics of women's involvement with scientific research.

From the beginning, political involvement has been an important part of the program. Some time before their senior year, students are required to spend a semester volunteering, or doing some real-world work outside of the classroom. Some choose to volunteer in literacy programs, others at abortion clinics.

Co-chair and co-founder Estelle Freedman said one of her proudest accomplishments with the program has been her nurturing of students "who will go out and apply the theory to the world."

During the early days of the program, some in the Stanford establishment were concerned by what they saw as an over-involvement in politics. The department had to decide how to walk the line between their political involvement and their scholarly pursuits.

Some of that decision is epitomized in the program's choice of the term "feminist studies" rather than the more sex neutral "gender studies" or the less politically charged "women's studies."

Sarah Horsley, a 1996 graduate, said she appreciated the fact that the program called itself feminist. It represented that the program was "not just a study of women, but a theory and a way of looking at the world," she said.

Horsley is now a development assistant at the East Bay Community Law Center, and has been actively involved in nonprofit work since graduating from Stanford.

In her own personal career, Freedman -- the author of "Their Sisters' Keeper: Women's Prison Reform" and "Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition" -- knows about the struggle that occurs when politics mixes with scholarly pursuits.

In 1981, shortly after the program was approved, Freedman was denied tenure because her work was deemed too political to be of scholarly interest. Only after fighting the decision was she able to get tenure in 1983 and become a Stanford icon.

Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor and the chair of the American Bar Association's Commission on Women, is another icon in the Feminist Studies department.

Rhode attended Yale University in the early 1970s, before women's studies programs existed. She spoke at the reunion about what academic life was like before women's programs were created.

Rhode remembered taking a course in 1900-1930s American political history, the era where women fought for and gained the right to vote. In the entire semester about the period, there was only one sentence that mentioned women's suffrage. The teacher, she said, "obliterated an entire 100 years of struggle."

E-mail Bill D'Agostino at bdagostino@paweekly.com