Joan Scott's dedication to women's studies and women's issues on campus
Joan Scott headed the committee that proposed beginning a women's studies program. O'Connor outlines the arguments used to push for the program and the ways the purposes outlined in the proposal created the basis for the first women's studies class.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Margaret Anne O'Connor, July 1, 1987. Interview L-0031. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
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 positive Reply," that
Professor Joan Scott submitted as Appendix D.
- PAMELA DEAN:
-
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?
MARGARET ANNE O'CONNOR:
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
Department offers freshman composition.
It's a tool that we hope that a student will master and then
be able to use to their advantage all over the University, and so we
might have three thousand freshman students in our English Department
for a year, and maybe our number of majors is quite a bit less than that
ultimately. That's what we thought would happen with
Women's Studies. We wanted to offer a broad course that would
give students a set of questions that they could bring to other classes
where the instructor might not have thought of the role of women yet,
and take this role of "remediation" quite a bit
further, not only just for the individual students involved, but use
those students from that class to disseminate interest in
women's issues and ideas all over the campus.
- PAMELA DEAN:
-
So that was the purpose of and remains, I believe, the purpose of
Women's Studies 50.
MARGARET ANNE O'CONNOR:
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.