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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview L-0031, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
English professor Margaret O'Connor reviews her early teaching experiences at UNC and how they led her to become interested in women's literature. She attributes much of her growing feminist awareness to Katherine Carmichael and to her students, who pushed for many of the early changes that occurred for women. As the status of women became an increasingly important topic, more and more demands were made on the female faculty who were already at the school. In response to these pressures, Catherine Maley established a women's forum so that they could share their stories. O'Connor responds with empathy when addressing the opposition to feminist faculty initiatives at the time, reflecting on how the male faculty must have felt. Despite this opposition, the women's studies department gained faculty approval, and the first class was taught by Joan Scott. The first director of women's studies was Mary Turner Lane, for whom O'Connor has great respect, though at the time she was disappointed in the way Lane handled the administrative side of the position. She credits Lane with improving the visibility of the program. O'Connor was on the board that appointed Lane's successor; she expresses her disappointment with the selection process and with the final selection. Nonetheless, O'Connor says she feels hopeful about the future of women's studies at UNC.
English professor Margaret O'Connor discusses the formation of the women's studies department at UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as some of the administrative and political issues she dealt with after its inception.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Let's start again. I'm sorry to put you through this with who you are, where you came from, and how you got into Women's Studies at UNC?
Well, I finished my Ph.D in American Literature with a dissertation on
Willa Cather at the University of California at Davis in the summer of
1981. Then three weeks later, I drove into Chapel Hill and virtually
immediately began teaching as an instructor in the Department of
English. My Chairman was James Gaskin, and at the end of that first
semester, he asked me if I would teach a course for Hinton James
dormitory, which had recently opened and which, like Carmichael
dormitory, apparently was trying to integrate a living and learning
situation in this new residence hall. The students had asked
specifically for a course in Women in Literature. I'd done a
dissertation on a woman writer. I certainly was not familiar with the
kinds of questions, the kinds of issues, that come up either in a
Women's Studies course or a Women in Literature course today. But nobody
else had been trained in that area either, and so I thought, "Well, I
might as well." It was really exciting. I had twenty-five students. We
met in the evening, two nights a week, and I had my students keep
notebooks. It was very personal, but then all of our teaching in the
department in composition was also very oriented toward keeping journals
and that sort of writing. So it was sort of an extension of the sorts of
things we were doing in other classes. But I had perhaps twenty women
and five men from Hinton James. There were two or
Most of the campus…
Most of the campus still is. It was exciting. We did not only American literature, we did European literature, and I learned an awful lot. It was one of those courses where I feel I learned at least as much as the students by going through some of the literature in translation. Some of the material I knew well in my own field and put it together for myself.
A little different perspective than if you approached it…
Certainly. A very different perspective because we were sort of looking at the way that women writers dealt with women characters, and the way that male writers, too, depicted them, and the opportunities and the options. We tried to separate the preconceptions that the authors had for their characters from the way that in reality, perhaps, a woman might respond in the various situations that the literature always found them in. It was exciting, and it was probably the major impetus that I had on an academic level for seeing more women's courses offered at the University.
Now about this time, or maybe a little bit later, Katherine Carmichael and the Women's Forum started, at least informally, collecting and disseminating information on courses being taught that focused on women.
Yes, and I think, probably, I wound up typing up most of those as well as gathering up the material myself. Katherine's office was a clearing house, essentially, in the first five years I was at the University for interest in the growing number of women's courses, particularly in the history department and in the foreign languages and also for faculty women. It was before there was any women's organization. It was a group that was composed of students, faculty, and staff. So it was a very unusual combination, and it was an exciting time. I think that might have been one of the most rewarding activities that Katherine Carmichael was involved in perhaps the last five years that she was at the University.
At this time she wasn't Dean of Women anymore. She was Assistant Dean
I believe she was Assistant Dean of Students. I would have to check on her title.
It was something like that.
The staff had grown so much that her responsibilities and duties had
diminished quite a bit so that she had more time to take on these other
roles. And I really do think that she became a focal point for an
activism among the undergraduate students that was apparent, certainly,
in the Association for Women Students and eventually became part of
University Women for Affirmative Action in about 1975-1976, and also for
the Association for Women Faculty that emerged from that group about two
years after the University UWAA officially disbanded. I
No formal motion to disband. Let's look at Women's Studies. Right from the very beginning you were very much involved in the various bodies that considered and passed on Women's Studies. Tell me about the general tone or the general atmosphere in the University. Was there a widespread demand for this? Where did this idea come from?
As I suggested with my own class in the English Department, I really do
think that the impetus emerged from the students first. This was and
still is a very conservative campus. When I joined the English
Department, it was about the same size as it is now, about sixty faculty
members at the assistant to full professor level in the department. At
the time I arrived, they had let their single woman go, the year before
I arrived, And they hired one woman, as an assistant professor, the year
I came as an instructor. So that was one out of approximately sixty.
That's unusual for an English Department because at least one third of
all Ph.D.'s given every year in English are given to women, and here at
UNC we've been giving women Ph.D.'s. since about 1910. Clearly, hiring
women was not a priority. Let me understate it that way. There was no
sense at the faculty level that this was necessarily a priority. Of
course, the University had traditionally been a men's institution, at
the undergraduate level, and that might account very much for the
predominantly male faculty. But this was the time that the University
opened its eyes, too, to its changing
There was one woman--if I recall, it was Women's Studies, but I'm not sure, it may have been one of the other committees--who turned down the request that she serve the committee because she said she was on thirteen others and she thought that that was enough. I also noticed that in the late 60's, Mary Turner Lane was on almost everything.
Mary Turner Lane was on everything.
I could tell you the names of the people: Ria Stambaugh, Mary Turner
Lane, Sara Immerwahr in the Art Department. As a matter of fact, I
remember one wonderful meeting, I wish you could find the tapes that
were recorded then. I'm pretty sure that they tape recorded the meeting.
Catherine Maley, when she was putting together her first year's report,
and this might have been in the spring of 1973, had a meeting open to
the general faculty and asked the question, "What do you think the
situation of faculty women is on this campus?" I sat there and I was
absolutely amazed. Women who I still tremendously admire, Sara Immerwahr
in art and Berthe Marti in classics, very "conservative" women, got up
and, one at a time, said what their history had been at the
University--how difficult it had been in the earlier years to begin and
how slow recognition came. Here I was listening to two women, Sara
Immerwahr and Berthe Marti, who are internationally renowned scholars,
who had taken three, four times as long as their male counterparts to
achieve recognition here. Well, that's Sara Immerwahr. Berthe Marti, as
a matter of fact, had been at Bryn Mawr and was recognized as a full
professor before she came, but she could still say, "Yes, we have to do
something for women." I
Let's continue the general…
The general mood on campus in the early 70's.
There was clear recognition on the part of women faculty that…
A growing recognition, as well as growing numbers. There were incredible strides made in hiring in the first five years of the decade. I came in '71, and by '75 or '76 I would think that the number of women on campus had quadrupled. That was certainly, at least…
'72 was the first time that they started admitting women on the same basis, undergraduate women, on the same basis as men, the same academic standards as men. So there was a great increase in the number of women in the student body and an increase in the number of women faculty.
Maybe, again, it's from my own perspective in the English Department, but
my department very much defined itself by its very active and prominent
graduate program. And as I say, women had always been a major group
among our graduate students, but there were few women on the faculty.
I'd seen a lot of graduate students, and in our own department there was
perhaps much more fervor and interest in feminism, not just sort of the
role of women, but very specifically feminism itself among our
There were no women in the administration, I can say, except for Lillian
Lehman, our registrar. There was initially no one else in
administration, and that was another concern that we had. I was very
interested in working with women's groups in the faculty, with
undergraduate students in the Women's Forum. With Katherine carmichael,
we worked very hard as a group on the Forum in making nominations to
different committees for honorary degrees. I believe that with her push,
several women in those first five years of the 70's received honorary
degrees, and no woman had received one since Eleanor Roosevelt. So it
had been quite a gap of time. It was something that she really promoted
very, very strongly. One of the people that I met on the Women's Forum
was one of the most active and important women in the formation of our
Women's Studies Program, and that's Joan Scott. She was, at that point,
an assistant professor, or maybe an associate professor of history. I'm
looking down at a paper that she gave me. She is, today, a member of the
regular research staff at the Princeton Center for Studies in the Social
Sciences, I believe, and previous to that, she held a chair in Women's
Studies at Brown University. So she has become an incredibly well-known
scholar in Women's Studies, and she was very active in
I think it all begins with Ria Stambaugh's recommendation that we form a committee on the role and status of women in about 1971 and in '72 and '73 with John Schoppler and Catherine Maley's groups. They put together a recommendation that in April of '74 that the Chancellor appoint a committee to look into the possibility of having a Women's Studies program on campus. I was one of the twelve members of that committee, twelve faculty members. I believe that there were several undergraduate students as well.
Let me ask you, before we go on and talk about the committee, we talked a little bit about the general sources of support for this idea throughout the University community, coming in part from the graduate students, I mean the undergraduate and graduate students as well as these faculty members.
Were there sources of opposition to the idea in general that surfaced at all in those early discussions?
Yes. Very, very clearly, but today, after sixteen years of being here, I
really feel that the major opposition was one of inertia. I've described
this as a conservative institution. I think that some of my colleagues
might take umbrage at that. After all, this is a campus that in the 30's
was a leader for the South in liberal attitudes and ideas, but really I
don't think those values had changed very much since the 1930's. And
this campus was open to black students before it was open to women
students. In some ways, there was some question
They knew a threat when they saw one.
They knew a threat when they saw it. I felt, for myself, a kind of
freedom that a lot of my male colleagues did not feel in their first
five years here, and a kind of a
That's very interesting and not what I'd expect at all.
When I was considered for tenure, I had a very strong vote. And I think a lot of that came from a sense that even colleagues that were reticent about accepting the sorts of changes that I was very anxious to see put in, couldn't begrudge my attempt. I could be very specific and talk about our Chancellor, who was very anxious to avoid the kind of upheavals of the late '60's.
Who was Chancellor?
N. Farabee Taylor. As gentlemanly as he was, my visual memories of Chancellor Taylor are going to be seeing him chain smoking in front of the Faculty Council. I bet he must have smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day. He fell very much under fire, and when I heard of his subsequent heart attack, and happily his recovery, and now he's in the law school, it occurred to me that a lot of the pressures that were being put on him as an administrator of those years were very visible at just those sorts of meetings between the faculty and the Chancellor. But at the same time that I can now empathize with him, at the time I just thought, "I don't know who he's looking after, but he's not looking after the women at this campus." I felt very, very embattled, and I'm sure that, from his point of view, that was a very warped perspective, mine. On a different level, I felt that Jim Gaskin, who went from the chair of the English Department to Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences the year after I came, was very anxious to get as many qualified women on the faculty as he possibly could and encouraged all sorts of departments. And that's where I saw amazing gains. I felt that he approached it with good will, with compassion, and tried to make the very best of a difficult situation.
So you wouldn't make any blanket statements that men were the enemy in this situation?
Men were in charge, and the people in charge were the enemy. What can I
say? There were no women. I'll be happy to share the blame, but you'd
have to go back and revise your statement. And I think it's absolutely
true that many of the men very few women, have broken into that ring.
Let's go on and talk some more about the actual committees that were involved when you got Women's Studies going.
Great, it's kind of nice just looking down at this report. I see some names, and I just wanted to remind people of these folks. The twelve faculty members are the people who stand in my mind, I guess, for the ad hoc Committee on Women's Studies that made its final report on April 18, 1975. I remember that well because we joked about the Longfellow kinds of connections. We made our report, and it was accepted unanimously, much to the surprise and shock and perhaps even the chagrin of many members of the faculty. I look and the first name that I see, our chairman was Richard Simpson from sociology, who was also chairing the Soc. Department. So it was an overload, without a doubt, for him to be put in charge of this committee to look into the possibility of maybe, perhaps, possibly putting together a Women's Studies Program if utterly, absolutely necessary.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
So Dick Simpson was the chair. I would say that on this committee I felt
very much an assistant professor. Jackie Hall, I believe, was also an
assistant professor, and it's my impression--and Anne Woodward, from
music, might have been an assistant professor at that time. Our
committee report, the final report, doesn't list what our rank was, but
I think it would be sort of important for people to be aware of that
Mary Turner Lane and Dell Johansen in economics and Catherine Maley were
associate professors and tenured. Tenure does mean something. I have to
commend the way that Dick Simpson ran the committee, because I think
that he tried to encourage the young turks as Jackie Hall and Anne
Woodward and myself would like to have thought of ourselves as being.
And we were very encouraged to speak. Maynard Adams was a Kenan
professor, and so was Duncan MacRay, and there were several full
professors on that committee who were male, and there were no women who
were full professors in this group. The women were far more likely to be
interested in the topic [of creating a Women's Studies Program] in
general. The only man on the committee going into it who was
enthusiastic was Peter Filene, who at that point, was an associate
professor, I think. His research was already moving in the direction of
gender issues, and he taught a course in Women in American History and
was very successful in the History Department. But I remember some
wonderful times. We talked about what this could possibly be, what kind
of classes, what would you talk about in the Women's Studies course. I
remember
By '81-82, there were seven Women's Studies majors.
Oh, I see.
So it was not long before Women's Studies majors moved up to philosophy.
Moved right up there to philosophy.
Now if we asked how many majors there are in Business Administration, we'd get a slightly different answer.
That's true, but…
You cannot judge the merits of an academic discipline on the number of its undergraduate majors.
Right, and I look down at this list of members of the ad hoc committee,
and I see Bob Mann in the Department of Mathematics. His complaint was
that there was simply no course that a woman could offer in mathematics
that had anything to do with Women's Studies, and frankly, I couldn't
think of one either. Sometimes, the levels of our discussions would just
sort of get down to, "Well, you could count the number of women at the
University, or you could count this and that and divide something." As
it turned out, I believe that mathematics has had some lecturers who are
coming in and talking about, have lectured in the last fifteen years or
so on the fear of mathematics and the way, perhaps, that this might be
gender-oriented, in a way that in the mid 70's Bob Mann was not aware,
that none of us were really that conscious of. I look down, and I see a
lot of names. I felt that this was one of the most important committees
I had been on at the University, and I'm sure that at the beginning,
certainly, the full professors and many of the men on the
That's impressive. Were undergraduates on this committee as well?
Yes, that's been a hallmark.
Do you recall the nature of their commitment?
They really did not carry the ball, certainly. We were being paid, and they were paying for the privilege of doing this, so I think that I'm not surprised, and I don't hold it against them. I do know that in Women's Studies, there has been a long tradition of undergraduate and graduate students serving on virtually all committees, and I think that for the most part, the written work is left in the hands of the faculty. I would like to think that if the undergraduate students felt that they had the time and the inclination that they could take a larger role than they do, but as it is, I think that their role is just to keep us honest.
So the committee report, and let me again put in, I think one of the most
important part of this whole committee report is "A Women's Studies
Program at UNC? A
Yes, I've got a copy of that, and it is superb and leads right in, if I recall the content of it, to the question I was going to ask you. What did the committee see as the purpose of a Women's Studies Program, the justification? What argument was Joan Scott making to the University community as a whole?
There's always the "everybody's doing it," which works when you're four
years old and works when you're thirty as well. "Everybody else has one.
Why can't we have one?" I think that there were two major rationales.
One was remediation, to offer a course that would give information and a
perspective that was simply unavailable in any other part of the
University. A second major reason was research and movement into a new
area, that UNC had not just gone along with the crowd in the past, that
we'd always been an innovator and that we, as much as the University was
behind in this area, that it also offered the kind of spirit that could,
with a feeling of good will, just move toward change and make some very
positive changes and really become a leader. We had the capacity after
the hirings of women and their interests. Women's Studies was burgeoning
all over the United States. Now, for the first time, you could have
faculty members who had actually had a women's course at another
institution, and that was utterly, I would guess, virtually impossible
until about '73 or '74, particularly at the graduate level. So those
were the two major reasons. It was also offered as a service course to
the entire University community, the way that the English
So that was the purpose of and remains, I believe, the purpose of Women's Studies 50.
That is our major course, and I believe it's organized, essentially, as Joan Scott first set it up. It is the question of sex roles as it adapts to various separate fields, and it's the same format that she put together ten years ago. She taught that course for the first two or three years. That's an incredible heritage, given, again, her prominence today.
Initially, she taught it as overload. She did not, the first year or two, get grace time to do that from the History Department. She taught it out of dedication, out of belief, above and beyond the call of duty.
I noticed, too, that Mary Turner Lane was listed on this list, and I
should mention her because, of course, she
What were the specifications? What was the job description? What were you looking for in a director?
I think that's an important issue because things have really changed now.
I remember that we were using as a guide to the job description the way
that American Studies, one of the more recent curricula at the
University, the way that it was organized. We, the committee, would
describe it to potential candidates as, "Well, this will be similar to
the American Studies Program, and this is the way it works." And so we
used some overviews that had been put together, I believe, as a matter
of fact, for affirmative action and for our affirmative action report,
or just sort of how it's structured and material like that. They have a
director. At that time, Joy Kasson, was full time, and she didn't have
another appointment in a department,
Just as a matter of funding or did you see this as an advantage, to be grounded and connected with a department?
I remember these are all issues that we went over so often, and I had
just finished looking at my own possible directions for the expansion of
the proposed course that I put in, as Appendix E of that report, and I
said that the position should be budgeted as full time in Women's
Studies and if departmental affiliation is desired by the board and the
director, that department should receive the services of the director
with no loss of funds from the departmental budget. I saw it that way so
that it would be a gift rather than subtracting half-time from a faculty
member. The University does not handle the appointment that way, and I'm
not sure if that's even a possibility, but I think it's kind of a pity.
I would like to see the directors, as a matter of fact, have the freedom
to decide to affiliate or not to affiliate. There are advantages for
someone who is trained in a discipline since there are very few ways
that one can get a Ph.D in Women's Studies. I believe, as a matter of
fact, Sarah Lawrence might do that for you in Women's History, and there
might be a couple of places, but it's very unusual and very hard to
establish yourself with that kind of, with a degree that isn't
recognized all over. So we knew we probably were going to get somebody
with a degree that was terminal in their own area, but we felt that they
would feel
So that someone would maintain their involvement with their major field as a career matter.
As well as Women's Studies. It is becoming more of a problem, I think. I
do think that perhaps I've been at meetings where people have been
asked, "Are you going to see yourself as someone in English and also
Women's Studies, or Women's Studies and also English?" A battle back and
forth, and I think that is a problem, but I would like those problems to
be resolved at the point of hiring, not at another level, so that
someone doesn't find themselves in an untenable position after they've
come. I think it's fair for us to bring them out into the open earlier.
When Mary Turner was appointed, I was under the impression--I was on the
search committee--that we were looking for a half-time director who
would teach the Women's Studies 50 course. When Mary Turner accepted the
position, it was on the premise that she not have teaching
responsibilities. She taught her regular course load, virtually, in the
School of Education, and Joan Scott taught the course. I was
disappointed, and that, I must say, is the only way I really felt
disappointed in Mary Turner's commitment. She did quite a bit of the
groundwork and administrative work that was absolutely vital to the
course, so again, now when I can revise my feelings, I think that
perhaps I was disappointed unfairly. There was no clear description that
said, "This person shall teach this number of courses. This person shall
have office hours." Today we have those, and I do
It's very difficult when you're developing a program, and you don't know quite what you're going to get.
How many people were considered? How many people applied for this? Was there a widespread interest?
For the directorship?
For the directorship, yes, initially, the first search.
Some of the criteria, or the main criterion was that it be a tenured person because we didn't want the role of Director of Women's Studies to jeopardize someone's career. As I say, there was still a tremendous amount of intertia in the University, and it would be possible for somebody to find themselves in a difficult situation.
So that limited your pool right there.
I, myself, was not tenured, and Jackie Hall wasn't tenured, and a lot of
people who had been active in it from the very beginning. Joan Scott was
not interested in the directorship, though she did serve as the director
of the Advisory Board, which in the first few years, because, I think,
of her strength, her own personal commitment to it, played a greater
role than it does today. As she describes it here [in
Committees recommend, the Chancellor appoints.
Right, so everything comes down, and Joan Scott was relatively new here
at the University, and her picture of it would be that there would be a
board of very active and committed teachers and scholars in Women's
Studies who would meet regularly and do the major work and as an added
responsibility as part of their commitment, would agree to serve for
several years in organizing the program. But there's no way to budget
that, apparently. There's no way to deal with it in our system, so what
we wound up with was a gerrymandered system of trying to superimpose the
University's system on what we hoped would be a brand new world. Mary
Turner agreed to serve in this capacity. I really do not remember any
other active candidate, and our only worry was that Mary Turner would
not want to do it. She was established in her field, and that could have
been a problem, but she agreed to do it. I think that took a tremendous
amount of courage. She also, at her own expense, went to a program the
summer before she began as Director of Women's Studies, a Women's
Leadership Program, and I think that was another thing that I
She suggested to me--this was when we first began talking, and I have not brought this up before--the implication was that one of the reasons the administration accepted her as the Director of Women's Studies Program was because she was Southern, and she was safe. They did not see her as some firebrand Yankee coming in here and advocating radical change. They felt that if they must have a Women's Studies Program, she'd be safe. Do you think there's any merit in that?
Yes, I think that, as I say, this is a conservative institution. That's
three times now that I've pointed out UNCCH's conservatism. Indeed, Mary
Turner had all of the credentials that would add up to Southern
womanhood. As a young widow, she had reared her daughter after going
back and getting her Master's and Ph.D degrees locally and taught here
for several years while she was finishing her Ph.D at Duke. She worked
as Katherine Carmichael's assistant for several years in addition to her
work in the School of Education in the early 50's. They knew her very
well, but as I say, the early 70's were making all of us open our eyes,
and I think that by 1975, they knew a very different Mary Turner Lane. I
don't know if she mentioned this to you, but she got into a pay dispute
at the School of Education, pointing out that her salary was incredibly
behind the salary of comparably qualified male members of the faculty,
and this had gone through several levels of the University. She had a
dispute with the School of Education that, I think, had become
That makes a lot of sense. In addition to that quality of cutting through, as you say, what would say her strengths were in this position? What were her greatest achievements, her greatest contributions, her strengths?
Her greatest strength, I'm sure, is perseverance, first of all. She must
have moved about three or four times, and sometimes her office looked
like a stall in the Women's Room. It was incredible, the sort of
confusion she put up with; I think
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I was proclaiming the glories of Mary Turner Lane, which I mean sincerely. I really admire her tremendously, and I think, as a matter of fact, that this career move was awfully good for Women's Studies, and it did not help Mary Turner Lane a bit in her own career at the University. I'm disappointed that she decided to retire last year as an Associate Professor. She deserved promotion to full professor. I'm sure that her publications and her work in Women's Studies could not have been taken into consideration adequately by a University committee; Women's Studies just falls in the gaps. The people who considered her for promotion whenever she came up were all in the School of Education, and the time and energy she put in outside the School of Education would have worked to her detriment. That's something that I wish the University were more cognizant of.
She mentioned, when we were talking about the committees she served on in the late 60's, dealing with rule changes in relation to women. She figured out the number of hours that she and the other committee people would spend, and she was sure that it was the equivalent of writing a book.
Right. But it was not writing a book.
It does not contribute to your record as a scholar.
Let me just remark on one other person here, Dell Johansen, of the
Department of Economics. I remember she retired early, in about 1977-78.
She was an Associate Professor in the School of Economics, and she
retired after she was passed over
I think that it's, in part, as you say, you're only judged on those very narrow achievements within your major field. It's a male definition of success and accomplishment.
But I'd like to point out that now that our younger and newer women
faculty members are not being asked to be on so many committees and are
not carrying the load, that they are meeting those standards very
easily. I think if that's what the University wants, that's fine. I do
sort of think, though, that the University runs the risk of losing some
of the best people, because one of the things that serving on six
committees does is make young faculty know their colleagues all over the
University, makes them feel very much a part of the community, and makes
a decision to leave to go to a different institution a very different
kind of decision. I would like to suggest that a lot of the younger
people, male and female, who are just being judged on their teaching
evaluations and the strength of their publications might leave. In a way
some of the other members of
Yes, I think you're right. I think the University is losing some of these requirements but maintaining that emphasis.
Right.
It's a cliche, but true. We talked about Mary Turner's strengths and how much she contributed. Do you see any weaknesses, any things you would have liked to have seen differently?
I served on the Women's Studies Advisory Board for, I believe, every
year. I was away for one year. I Fulbrighted in Germany in '78-79, but
the rest of the time, I served on that Women's Studies Board. I was
occasionally impatient. I wanted more changes; I wanted more interest in
course development in the different departments. Mary Turner put her
emphasis in image-building, in presenting a view of Women's Studies that
showed first of all that it was respectable, and sometimes, I guess I
got distracted by her Southernness and sort of assumed that this was
some kind of power play in one sense rather than a sincere effort to
improve Women's Studies. I would ask, "Who cares whether people think
well of the program or not?" Well, it matters a great deal, of course.
I've come to believe that everything that Mary Turner did do, meeting
with sororities and going to women's groups on campus and working with
the Chancellor and being sent to alumni meetings and that sort of thing.
All of this image-building was important. She did an awful lot of that,
and it was quite valuable. It made a difference. It brought
So you're basically saying that her major contribution to the program was to give it a degree of respectability and legitimacy?
Visibility.
Visibility that perhaps a radical, hard-hitting approach might not have achieved.
I have to say this, that Mary Turner was much more radical and
hard-hitting in what she wanted to do with the Association for Women
Faculty, and there were other ways that she was working for improving
the role of women on campus beyond what she got paid for and the hours
that she might have felt were her responsibility in holding office hours
or something like that. There was quite a bit of work for women being
done. I think that, I also have to give her credit. She was the major
person
Women's Studies Research Center.
The Women's Studies Research Center. It's now the Duke-UNC Center for
Research on Women, and that, in her last year, that's really what she
helped put together. I remember, too, I'm going to put this in because
I'm on that board now. I've been on it for about three years, and Anne
Firor Scott from Duke, who chairs their History Department, who did
chair it, is also on the board, and I remember we interviewed her when
we wanted to put together this curriculum in Women's Studies. She was
against it. She came from Duke, and she said, "No, I don't want to see
you ghetto-ize the study of women. I think it would be a mistake." Her
book on the Southern lady is absolutely standard reading for Women's
History, and yet, she could say, in 1974, that it would be a mistake.
But, a few years later, when the opportunity arose to put together this
center, she and Bill Chaffe decided that they would team up with Jean
O'Barr at Duke and put together a Women's Studies Program. It was done
almost by executive fiat at that point because there was so much feeling
from the newer people who had been wanting it for years but meeting the
kind of resistance of someone that they respected so tremendously like
Anne Scott. They couldn't do anything, but as soon as she said, "Well,
O.K. I can see if we're going to have this research program, maybe there
would be an advantage of having a Women's Program at Duke." As soon as
she agreed to it,
That would have been hard to go against someone of her stature. It's not like saying it's just a reactionary male.
No, not at all. It's sort of hard to align all of these issues by male and female really.
Why did Mary Turner Lane leave the position of Director of Women's Studies?
I think that there was a lot of feeling then that we now could get a Director of Women's Studies who was trained in Women's Studies who had a national reputation in Women's Studies, and that this was a good time to do that. As I say, when the program began, it was Joan Scott and Mary Turner, and we knew we had someone who had a strong teaching commitment to the area as well as a good administrator of the program. When Joan left, that really did leave a void, so
That would leave at least one year that Mary Turner supervised at least, but she didn't actually teach the course. It was the TA's that handled the bulk of it.
Right. That's virtually all that is done now as far as I can tell. The
original syllabus is still used. It's sort of like a cafeteria approach
in one sense. There are lots of speakers, and the director invites
people in. Joan Scott did that herself. That's how she was able to teach
Women's Studies 50 on top of her regular course load. Part of the new
job description was going to be that someone would actually teach that
class and any other courses that we wanted to develop. We
And that was Williamson?
Sam Williamson, right, said, "O.K. I'm going to put together a committee
that will look for a new director." I think he was interested, now, in
seeing this turn into a nationally recognized program. I was on that
committee too, and that committee eventually made the job offer to Jane
Mathews, now Jane De Hart Mathews, and she, as matter of fact, was one
of the people who was quoted in this original report. She had put
together the Women's Studies Program at Greensboro, and again, a
committee of faculty and students, this time graduate and undergraduate
students, served as a search committee with Beverly Long in charge of
that committee. We were told we could organize the search in any way we
wanted to, and we decided that we would go for a half-time position in a
department and the other half in Women's Studies. We wanted someone with
a real teaching commitment. We wanted someone, preferably at the full
professor level if we could get her, and the way we decided to handle
that
People who had no interest in having someone interested in Women's Studies join?
Right. But I shouldn't just refer him by a label. He's a very fair man.
I'm talking about Richard Rust. He is Mormon, and his wife Patricia was
in charge of the "North Carolina Anti-ERA," and I think at every turn,
he has to fight down his own personal reaction to the woman's issue, and
I found him incredibly fair in most cases. But in this case, and I'm
sure he put in the time because it was required, but again, his heart
was not in it--far from it. There were other members of the committee
whose honesty and fairness I have a lot more doubts about than Dick Rust
who were there as well. The vast majority of applications were in
History and English. The History Department gave us a list of nine
people that they would accept at the full level and a couple at the
Associate level, I believe. The English Department came up with only
four people that they would possibly accept. One at the full professor
level, but she had already asked that her name be withdrawn, but they
were embarrassed, so they gave us her name anyway because that meant
that there were no people at the full professor level that they were
interested in having as a gift. Now this is my department, and I talked
to Anne Hall, who was the woman on that departmental committee. Weldon
Thornton chaired it. Townsend Luddington was on it, and Mark Reed as
well. At any rate, I asked Anne, "How did this happen? How did someone
as talented as Annette Kolodny, for instance, get zapped?" She wasn't
even accepted as a non-tenured faculty member. I can't believe this. She
would have been a shoe-in. There would have no question about it." And
Anne said, "Well, I have never seen anybody work as hard as Mark The Lay of the Land. He
had gone through, and he made a two hour presentation, line for line.
What he disagreed with was the whole idea of a connection between
psychology and literature. He couldn't accept her methodology, and Anne
Hall said it was just so apparent that he would never, never have voted
to permit her in the department, under any circumstances, even as a
gift. This was the level of discussion, so it was inevitable that our
new Director of Women's Studies was probably going to be one of the
historians on that list. There were nine possibilities, and there were a
couple of people in Speech and a couple from the outside, but the people
with the real reputations were in history, and we wound up not even
going with them. Again, sort of doing everything by committee, we really
just, it was a major disappointment. Beverly Long and I now get together
and lean back and think such things as "You know what we really should
have done was…" We were told by the Dean that any way we wanted to do
it, we were to give him three names of people who were acceptable as
Director of Women's Studies. Once we gave him the list of three, he
would make the decision. He wanted these in alphabetical order; he
didn't want us to decide which, and that's what we did. Unfortunately, I
guess we didn't believe him. You might be interested, as a matter of
fact, in looking at a student newspaper that came out right after. You
might have seen it. Is it in the archives?
They have it in microfilm. I've got it.
That's interesting because one of the student members of the board gave
an interview in the Daily Tar Heel that protested the
final choice of director. She accused other committee members of
unfairness. You see, we gave the Dean our short list of three people,
one of whom was totally unacceptable after they came, just absolutely
unacceptable. Then, the other two were possibilities, and the committee
very clearly favored a candidate in Speech, the twelve of us, very
clearly. Maybe there was one person who favored Jane Mathews, but, you
see, we had turned in our list of three finalists before we'd even met
them and talked to them. We just sort of thought, of course, the Dean
would say, "Hey, I've thought it over, and I want you to take that one
person off the list and put on a better name now."
Why was the process that way? Why did you give him the names before you'd…
Because he only offered enough money to bring three or four people to campus, and Jane Mathews, at the time, was in Finland. Ninety-nine percent of the time, she was in Greensboro, but this particular semester, she and her husband were sharing a Fulbright Chair or something like that in Finland, and that just ate up all of the money. I think it's really unfair to think, though, that her appointment was a shoe-in, that John Kasson, for instance, who was the history member of the department, was biased in favor of Jane Mathews because she was married to John Kasson's colleague, Donald Mathews.
That's one of the charges that was made in this case.
Right, and I think that Emily really messed up. The unmentioned source was Emily Seelbinder. I could shoot her most of the time. I have told her this, by the way. We have discussed this often.
She was a TA for Women's Studies 50 for quite a while.
For quite a while, and she really had the feeling that she was it, she
was Women's Studies, and she just shot down the best candidate that we
had in the English Department, Wendy Martin because Wendy had been asked
to teach that course one of those years between Joan Scott's absence and
the hiring of Jane Mathews. Wendy who, in her early forties, had just
had her first baby in December, started teaching this course in January,
and she was there to keep things going, not to change, not to do
anything, and Emily Seelbinder was not impressed. I pointed out to Emily
that, frankly, Wendy Martin had a lot of things on her mind, including a
one month old baby. At any rate, you can say, "Well, O.K. That wasn't
very smart of Wendy Martin." But still, at any rate, that's just one
small thing, but I think Emily got really carried away. Without
consulting anyone else on the committee, she gave this interview that
accused, essentially, I think she even used his name, John Kasson, of
this set up deal. That's not incredible. John did his job, and he did it
very well. His job was to come up with people from the History
Department and get the best people we possibly could. He did it much
better than anybody else, and Jane Mathews could well have been his
personal favorite. That's true, of the group that was there, but I'll
tell you. Sam Williamson has never gotten along
She'd already been running Women's Studies in Greensboro. She'd done a credible job there.
Yes, she had begun the program. We found out more after the appointment.
I've discovered that this is
Certainly. You left the board shortly, a year or so after Jane took over?
Yes. I agreed to serve one year after Jane Mathews began as Director of
Women's Studies. As I say, I was away for a year, and then, the next
year, I was on the search committee that offered her the job. So
1981-82, I believe, was my last year on the Women's Studies Board. That
was after. I had been on it, except for that one year's absence, since
its inception, and I was the only one. So I offered lots of continuity.
I was very willing to do that, and I met some very new people in Women's
Studies. That was the year I first met Judith Bennett. I think she is
absolutely superb, and Rachel Rosenberg in Sociology, also someone with
a real commitment and a great knowledge of Women's Studies. Also, Dot
Howze-Brown. She has been married for years but has only recently
started using her husband's last name, in Public Health. That was the
year Dot Howze-Brown was on the board, and she did a wonderful job. She
virtually put the internship program together herself. It came up at an
early meeting. It was something that Jane had mentioned in her
interviews with us that she was interested in seeing, and Dot said that
she wasn't sure if she was going to be able to make it to meetings very
regularly since she was over on the other side of campus and that she
had different demands on her time, but that if it would be all right,
she would like to take over that responsibility and that would be her
contribution to Women's Studies that year. So she is the one who sent
out letters all over the country, to all faculty to get the names and
coordinated things, and got a list of places that were willing to take
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
I must say, though, I was very happy to get off the Women's Studies Board at the end of that year. I really felt that it was time for a change. We had a new director. I had, I hope, helped with the continuity, but there's also this feeling that I had my own expectations about what Women's Studies should be, and I felt it was really good for Jane Mathews to have a chance to work with a new group of people.
Have you continued to watch the program?
Yes, I have.
What's your assessment of how it's gone?
It's hard to talk about the program separate from personalities still.
Again, the way the whole spirit of Women's Studies, as it started on
this campus and as I assume it is elsewhere, certainly the way that the
National Women's Studies Association, is set up is one of shared
leadership. And yet the University demands, requires, a kind of a star
system. With only one appointment in Women's Studies, it becomes an
assessment of the single person who has that position. And from the
outside, I've been less happy with the program now than I was five or
six years ago. And yet, I look and I see that since Jane De Hart
Mathews's time, the physical facilities that Women's Studies has, the
number of people, the positions that they have in administrative roles
and staffing, the number of TA's--it's grown tremendously. I think
there's really a strong interest in Women's Studies that has nothing to
do with the director of Women's Studies promoting it. I think that comes
from word of
That's seems to pretty much cover the basic questions that I had on Women's Studies.
Let me just make one more comment about Shirley Weiss.
One semester, Shirley Weiss was asked to direct Women's Studies. It was a
semester when the Women's Studies 50 course was not being offered, but
Shirley, who is one of those old time women like Mary Turner and Berthe
Marti that I mentioned earlier. She teaches in City and Regional
Planning, which doesn't have a lot of options for teaching and research
interest on women's issues. And yet, as a president of AAUP, she's had a
lot of responsibilities, university-wide, and wanted to see the program
succeed, so she agreed to direct Women's Studies that fall semester. I
just wanted to put in a good word for her because while she was the
director, as a matter of fact, they considered a project that was a
favorite of mine--a book collection for a small North Carolina library
that is called the Martha E. Chue Collection in Women's Health and
Culture. This is the Clarkton Library. Martha Chue was a North
Carolinian who died of breast cancer in 1984, I believe, and she had
worked here in Chapel Hill. She got all of her degrees outside of the
state, but she spent one year, I believe, in John Reed's NEH seminar on
Southern Culture. While she was here, she worked for the state of North
Carolina in doing a pamphlet on Women's Health for them, and she made a
lot of friends here. And while she was here, she's also made a point of
saying that she wished--she was from such a small
Thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW