You may have noticed that the credit ratings of a number of colleges have been downgraded, even some (or at least one) that has one of the largest endowments around.    Indeed, the financial problems that are evident to all, have had an impact and outrageous tuition costs make going to college a struggle and out of reach for many.   I won't even go into here the role of banks in all of this.... here I just want to briefly point out that a good number of the colleges in question are small liberal arts institutions.  In tandem with the financial downgrading is a degrading and devaluing of a certain kind of education that values learning for its own sake and more.  This kind of education, the kind that one gets in my institution, for example, is one that values analytical thinking, deriving meaning, critiquing, interrogating history, problems, making links between that which we learn and that which we live, but it is losing credibility in an ever increasingly consumer, profit driven, corporate controlled global economy.   This anti-analytical, anti-creativity (of a certain kind) narrative is based in fallacious thinking and deliberately misleading propaganda and assumptions.  First of all, for all of those who believe an education should be seen only as a function of what its potential job outcome will be are just plain wrong if they think a well-rounded liberal arts education has no relationship to succeeding in the global job market.  I recently heard someone who had opened a small manufacturing business opining that he was having trouble finding the right people to work in his firm.  It was not that he could not find engineers who (on paper) were qualified for his particular business.  His problem was that these well educated   professionals were not well educated in analytical and creative thinking and they did not have those skills, like writing clearly (therefore thinking clearly) that he needed.  This, he said, was a big problem.   My kind of institution fills these voids.  Secondly, there is a misunderstanding about what is taught and learned at our colleges.  Everything is taught and learned.  Students get that old fashioned well rounded education and can center their studies in a particular area.  Here at Sarah Lawrence College, our physics glasses are increasingly over enrolled, for example.  Our students take creative writing and science and literature and language and etc etc etc. They are often scholars and activists; they see the connections between the issues in the world and their scholarly and artistic pursuits.  Some of our graduates include Barbara Walters, Vera Wang, J.J. Abrams, Rahm Emanuel, and many more in a myriad of fields. My program, the Women's History Graduate Program, emphasizes critical thinking.  Our students become incredibly skilled problem solvers.  By the time they finish this program, not only can they research better than a lot of PhDs in various fields, they can argue a point, support their assertions, creatively seek solutions to problems and so forth.  I recently got a breakdown of all of the jobs, careers, professions in which our alumni work and have worked.  It is a list that even surprised me.  Some go further in school, others do not.  Our graduates in the Women's History Graduate program are archaeologists, archivists, businesses innovators (profit and non-profit), congressional candidates, chiefs of staff to governors, professors, labor organizers, teachers of all kinds, town historians, directors of student affairs, computer experts, writers, editors, ministers, and more.  So, my point is, don't believe everything you hear.  The financial powers that be may downgrade our bond rating, but don't believe the hype that attempts downgrade our value.  We at Sarah Lawrence College, in the whole school, and in the Women's History Graduate Program know we have great value. As long as we value ourselves, we can never be downgraded.

We are back from break.  Our last Amy Swerdlow lunchtime brigade discussion for the year took place today, April 3, 2013.  This time we focused on Sexual Assault and Rape Culture on College Campuses, a subject much in the news of late.  It seems, we all agreed, that the onus has consistently been on the victim of the rape, that generally any "education" that takes place (which seems to be very little) tends to be about how to prevent it from happening (that is how a girl or woman must prevent it from happening) with little to no discussion about who commits these acts, why and how to prevent the would be attacker from attacking, especially since often he does not see his attack as an attack. There even seems to be a lot of confusion on college campuses about protocol when the worst does happen.  Often aggressive sexual behavior, as in come on over and watch tv that turns into "pushy" sexual expectation is seen by friends as just a personality quirk and not to be taken seriously.  If friends don't clue this aggressor in on the invasion that this is and don't question the assailant on how far he has and might take his behavior, well no one will.  It seems some men really do need step by step instructions on what constitutes sexual assault and some schools put some truly important "instruction" in place, but it seems some of this has not necessarily been carried forward into the 2000s.  Schools, it seems, tend to try to cover up these incidents.  Young women get counseled to get help and nothing much happens to the man or the matter goes quietly away in one way or another so that school marketing doesn't get disrupted.  Such bad publicity could certainly worry parents and students alike.  There are so many levels to the problem and the solutions: education for all about how to deal with preventing and dealing with such violent assaults (one participant in our discussion pointed out that the violence of these acts often gets left out of the narrative), and the reasons that they occur.  What part does media representation play?  How are ideas about gender ideology intertwined with such acts?  What part does consumerism play in selling gender and how is it all linked to such behaviors?  What part has the sexualization of just about everything, especially very young females played in all of this?  How do we deal with this in the short and long term?  This list of questions goes on and shows how complex a social, cultural, political, and economic issue it is.

The 15th annual Women's History Conference at Sarah Lawrence College, sponsored by the Women's History Graduate Program, was an enormous success.  R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University, Alice Kessler-Harris started the conference off with an inspiring and extremely insightful keynote address.  The evening began with clips from the film At Home in Utopia in which Amy Swerdlow, former student and director of the Women's History Graduate spoke about her early life in cooperative housing in the Bronx with an anarchist mother and communist father.  The conference was entitled Activism and Scholarship: A Conference Honoring Amy Swerdlow.  Friends, family, colleagues, "fans," students and more attended and heard about this much beloved scholar activist who worked tirelessly for peace and justice throughout her life and demanded that all that was done should include joy, otherwise there really is no point.  Attendees saw images of Amy Swerdlow as an active participant in truly leaderless and non-partisan Women Strike for Peace, the group that fearlessly faced the House Un-American Activities Committee and was instrumental in ending above ground testing of nuclear weapons.

Another highlight of the conference featured Blanche Wiesen Cooke, distinguished professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York Graduate Center, who moderated a panel on Saturday that included two alumnae of the program, Carole Artigiani, founder of Global Kids, Inc, and Melanie Gustafson, Professor at the University of Vermont, as well as scholar/author and former professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Phyllis Vine.  All of these women shared their experiences with Amy Swerdlow as teacher and/or co-worker.  Professor Cook talked about some of Amy's scholarship, particularly her book about Women Strike for Peace.  Amy's scholarship was extensive and included:

“Abolition’s Conservative Sisters: The Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Societies, 1834–1840.”
In The Abolitionist Sisterhood, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (1994);
“‘Clean Bombs’ and Clean Language.” In Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory (1990);
“The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War.” In U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (1995);

Amy Swerdlow's committment and love of the Sarah Lawrence College Women's History Graduate Program is legendary.   It was fitting that this tribute took place here at SLC with people who she educated, worked with, and to whom her legacy of scholarship and activism has been handed down.

More about the conference and related topics will follow tomorrow.

Watch for Alice Kessler-Harris's keynote address which will appear soon on the Sarah Lawrence College Women's History Graduate Program website and facebook page.

Please comment on the conference here and on our facebook page and always like us.

Would love to hear reactions to Makers: Women Who Make America before I give my opinions.  Anybody?

And, another reminder: Hope you will attend the upcoming Women's History Conference at Sarah Lawrence College.  Friday at 6, Professor/author, Alice Kessler-Harris addresses the audience in her keynote.  Saturday, Blanche Wiesen Cook and panel discuss the life and legacy of Amy Swerdlow, activist/scholar.

Join us in celebrating Activism and Scholarship: A Conference Honoring Amy Swerdlow, March 1 and 2 at Sarah Lawrence College.  Free and Open to the Public

For more information and to register go to:
http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/womens-history/conference/index.html

I hope to see you there!

Have you seen the Sunday, NYT "Debating Semantics of 'Rape'"?  Read and think: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/nyregion/debating-the-semantics-of-rape.html?_r=0

The history of the definition of rape in the law and the degree to which a woman would be regarded as "a reliable narrator of the sexual violence that she had endured,"  is one topic addressed in a documentary about the modern feminist movement beginning this Tuesday, February 26 on PBS. 

I wonder to what degree this documentary will address the widespread participation of women throughout the nation and the world in diverse feminist actions, from diverse points of view, the connections made by many feminists about intersecting oppressions and so forth - and, the diversity of feminisms in feminism.  I look forward to seeing how the filmmakers have addressed this Civil Rights movement!  It's a multipart series so there are plenty of opportunities for addressing a multiplicity of issues and participants.

I would be interested in hearing what seems familiar and unfamiliar to others once it gets going.

Register for the Upcoming Women's History Month Conference

Reminder:  Register for the 15th Annual Women's History Month Conference at Sarah Lawrence College
Go to: http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/womens-history/conference/index.html

Our theme this year is Activism and Scholarship: A Conference Honoring Amy Swerdlow

The following is a tribute to Amy Swerdlow composed by former Director and SLC faculty member, Priscilla Murolo and read at a remembrance ceremony last June:

In Memory of Amy Swerdlow

June 1, 2012

            My name is Priscilla Murolo.  I teach history at Sarah Lawrence and co-direct the graduate program in women’s history.  It’s my honor to speak in remembrance of Amy Swerdlow, a woman so vibrantly alive that all of us who crossed paths with her find it almost impossible to accept that she is gone. 

            Amy came to Sarah Lawrence in the fall of 1972, as a member of the first entering class of master’s candidates in women’s history.  By May 1973 the College had recruited her to teach a seminar titled “Women Organizing Women.” It was a course unlike any other Sarah Lawrence had ever offered or has offered since.  Supported by grant money, Women Organizing Women brought together five Sarah Lawrence undergraduates, five graduate students in women’s history, and five women community activists from Yonkers and surrounding towns.   Here’s a sentence from the minutes of the meeting at which faculty members associated with the women’s history program decided that Amy should teach the course:  “Everyone agreed that she is the best possible person for this position and that it would be a waste of time to interview anyone else.”

            Now, believe me, it is a very unusual thing for someone to enter a college or university as a graduate student and get drafted onto its faculty eight months later.  But Amy was a very unusual someone.  As an adult student with four children, she earned her bachelor’s degree in art history with honors at NYU.  In 1961, the year before she finished at NYU, she became a founding member and organizer of Women Strike for Peace, which mobilized for a ban on nuclear testing and then against the U.S. war in Southeast Asia.  When Amy arrived at Sarah Lawrence, she was still working with Women Strike for Peace, now editing its quarterly journal, and she had added quite a bit more to her activist portfolio:  member of the national board of the antiwar group known as Clergy and Laity Concerned; chair of the steering committees of two antiwar coalitions of women’s groups, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade and the Women’s Emergency Coalition; member of the New York State coordinating council of the National Women’s Political Caucus; public speaking across the country on behalf of the feminist and antiwar movements; author of numerous articles on women’s peace activism; member of the board of directors of an interracial housing coalition in Great Neck, Long Island, where Amy and her husband Stanley Swerdlow raised their family.  So it’s both highly unusual and entirely understandable that Amy joined Sarah Lawrence’s faculty within year of her arrival as a student.

            The seminar Women Organizing Women was a smashing success, so much so that Sarah Lawrence could not let Amy leave after she earned her M.A. in 1974, with a thesis on women’s activism in the Ladies New York Anti-Slavery Society of the 1830s.  No sooner had she finished the thesis than President Charles DeCarlo appointed her Associate Director of Women’s Studies at Sarah Lawrence and announced that she would once again teach Women Organizing Women.  During her several years as the associate director, she also headed the American Historical Association’s Institute for Women’s History in Secondary Schools and, and at Sarah Lawrence she organized a national conference of women activists that generated the campaign to establish March as Women’s History Month. 

            Eventually, we had to let Amy go, but only on the condition that she return as soon as possible.  In the late 1970s, when she went off to Rutgers University to earn her Ph.D. in history, two things were understood:  that her doctoral dissertation would be a study of Women Strike for Peace and that she would come back to Sarah Lawrence to run the graduate program in women’s history.  That is exactly how it turned out.   In 1981, Sarah Lawrence appointed Amy a professor of women’s studies and U.S. history, she became the director of graduate studies in women’s history in 1983, and she went on to transform her dissertation into a wonderful book:  Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993.  The same year the book came out, Amy retired from Sarah Lawrence, and although she came back several times as a guest speaker or for other special events, her departure left a hole that really cannot be filled—at least not in the way that Amy did the job.

            Thinking about what I would say today, I asked myself again and again what made Amy such a good organizer.  It’s not an easy question to answer because Amy was herself fairly disorganized.  All of us who worked with her have multiple memories of Amy dashing off to a meeting or a class or some other gathering scheduled to begin three minutes before she got on her way.  She often wore shawls, or scarves or capes that would fly back as she hurried forward; yet as much as she hurried it seemed that her hair and make-up perfectly stayed in place and that at least one item of clothing picked up the red tints of her hair.  Amy might be distracted, but never disheveled.  In fact she looked like a work of art.  Who could not be attracted to someone so beautiful?  Who could refuse her a request?  That must have been part of what made her a good organizer.

            And of course there was also her experience with activism—not just all the work I’ve mentioned but also her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of Communists, growing up in a cooperative housing project in the Bronx, marching in May Day parades, proudly becoming a member of the Supreme Soviet at Camp Kinderland, mobilizing in support of the Loyalist cause in Spain, becoming the national high-school secretary of the American Student Union, and then later, as an adult, weathering McCarthyism, losing faith in the Soviet Union, and seeing her father’s stalwart faith disintegrate too.  Amy learned from all of this.  It made her wise about the ways social movements rise and fall; what they can and cannot accomplish; how history turns corners and demands that we re-imagine the future.  Much better than most people—even most historians—Amy could read the possibilities peculiar to an historical moment.  And far, far better than most academics, Amy knew how to manipulate a bureaucracy to get things done.   These are essential traits of an effective organizer.       

            More than anything else, though, I think that Amy’s activism rested on love.  She understood people; she went out of her way to meet their needs.  When things went wrong—when a student or colleague fell down on the job—I never saw Amy cast blame or get angry; instead, she’d shrug and give a little smile and try to figure out how to make the best of whatever bad situation had presented itself.  And Amy was good at intimacy.  My favorite memory of her is of a conversation we had in December 1992, on the Amtrak coming back from a trip to Washington for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.  Amy had a wonderful time at that conference, staying out to the wee hours as she reconnected with old friends.  On the way back, we spoke about the future of women’s history and then for a very long time about our families.  Amy talked to me about her parents; about her husband Stanley who had passed the year before; about her children Joan, Ezra, Lisa, and Tommy and their spouses and children.  I will never forget that day:  where we sat on the train, the low and throaty sound of Amy’s voice, the way the setting sun caught her hair, and my realization as she spoke that there was a seamless connection between Amy Swerdlow’s commitments to her loved ones and her commitments to activism in behalf of a better world. That’s what made this beautiful, wise and not-so-organized woman not only a superb organizer but also an inspiring teacher and a colleague who exemplified what it means to meet one’s obligations to the human family.