From the Archives

CROW /IRWG Oral Histories: The Institute's First Twenty Years

50th anniversary content, from the archives (1994): 
Oral history, featuring Jing Lyman, Diane Middlebrook, Marilyn Yalom, Karen Offen, Susan Groag Bell, Edie Gelles, Laraine Zappert, Barbara Gelpi, and Carolyn Lougee Chappell

Introduction 

By Judy Adams

In 1994, as part of my interest and long-time participation in the Stanford Oral History project and the Center for Research on Women (CROW) and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (the Institute), I offered a listing through Undergraduate Research Opportunities to recruit students to become involved in a project to interview key participants in CROW and the Institute. I met for several sessions with three Stanford undergraduates, Kathleen Peterson, Eleanor Lewis, and Victoria Foster (class of 1996), who were excited to start the project.

We discussed and practiced oral history interview techniques and compiled a list of resources for historical background research. Their faculty advisor, Mollie Schwartz-Rosenhan, and I worked with the students on a list of interview questions for key individuals who were then on campus—questions designed to elicit respondents' unique perspectives on the founding of CROW and its evolution into the Institute. The students had access to files from the Stanford News Service as well as materials at the Institute, including audio tapes of conference presentations, policy board minutes, publications, and other documents. They also reviewed transcripts of previous Stanford Oral History Project interviews in the Stanford University Archives. We identified twenty-four men and women who were available and willing to be interviewed for the project. With the last element in place—support from Laura Selznick, then the Director of Undergraduate Research Opportunities (URO)—the students were ready to begin their project.

The oral histories are a treasure-trove of information and insight into the participants' views of the establishment, evolution, and value of CROW and its growth into the Institute over the years. 

Armed with a tape recorder and microphone they borrowed from me, they began their interviews in July of 1994. They did partial transcripts of most of the interviews and began drafts of their collaborative paper. But as sometimes happens, the report on their project was never completed. However, the tapes from it, "The First Twenty Years of Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender," are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives. In 2004, ten years after the interviews, I began the slow process of completing transcripts for all the interviews, with funding from the Stanford University Archives. We hope to have the transcripts released for researchers' use in 2007 to supplement the Clayman Institute archive.

The oral histories are a treasure-trove of information and insight into the participants' views of the establishment, evolution, and value of CROW and its growth into the Institute over the years. Interview questions included: how they became involved in feminist and gender issues in their personal lives and academic careers; the supportive role played by CROW and the Institute in their development as scholars and researchers; the role of CROW and the Institute within the university and in relation to other similar institutes; the variety of events, symposia and lecture series offered by CROW and the Institute over the years; the "Signs years"; the development of the Associates program; the Affiliated and Associate Scholars programs and their contribution to CROW and the Institute; the development of Feminist Studies at Stanford; and the evolution of the interviewees' personal definitions of feminism.

These interviews, combined with the historical documents in the Clayman lnstitute's archives, provide an intimate view of the significance of the organization as it grew and changed with the times to foster gender studies among faculty, students, and community members. A common theme among the women interviewed—and the men as well—was that CROW/the Institute provided a place with a warm, supportive atmosphere where they could explore new territory in research, conduct collaborative projects, and debate gender issues with colleagues across a broad spectrum of academic fields.

What follows are edited excerpts from several of the project's oral history interviews.

Judy Adams was an IRWG Affiliated Scholar from 1986 to 1989, when she completed research for Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists. The book features interviews with older women activists which she, volunteers, and her students at Stanford and San Jose State conducted over a ten-year period. In addition to the Women's Peace Oral History Project, she has raised funds for history of science oral histories and has been an interviewer and transcriber for the Stanford Oral History Project.

Oral History Interview Excerpts (1994)

JING LYMAN came to Stanford in 1958 when her husband Dick, who served as University President from 1970-1980, joined the History Department. She has worked tirelessly on community issues, including women's employment, innovative housing for low-income elderly, and women's philanthropy. She played an essential role in the formation and nurturance of many organizations, including CROW.

... I didn't have a policy-making role at the Institute. I have never been a member of the Policy Board. I did a lot of informal counseling but it was always informal. ... I participated in ... the bulk of the meetings that led up to the formation of CROW.

... It is absolutely astonishing how far we have come on a whole lot of issues relating to women. We're not there yet, but we've come a long, long way. And it's partly because ... Stanford was one of the first [universities] in the country to have an institute, a Center for Research on Women. It was the first one that had hard-based budget money to support it. And Myra's [Strober] role was of course critically important, both as the first director, but also as the first chair of the Council on Centers of Research on Women, which was a brainchild of Marian Chamberlain, who funded CROW with a Ford grant. That got CROW off the ground. So all of these interrelate, and you have to understand that all running parallel with this, I was ... working with Dick, who was ... always incredibly supportive of … women, particularly as professionals in academia.

… I don't think we've made the kind of progress we ought to have been making, nationally, on either feminist studies or gender issue research ... I'm more and more convinced that institutional culture still finds gender issues much more difficult to address overtly than racial and cultural issues. I think gender issues are very close to the bone and very scary.

… There is [still] some very creative work going on that needs to have our attention.

DIANE MIDDLEBROOK, who served as Director of CROW from 1977 to 1979 and Chair of the Program in Feminist Studies from 1985 to 1988, is a Professor Emerita of English. When she came to Stanford in 1966, there had been no women hired with tenure-track appointments in the English Department for many decades.

We organized the CROW Group—we didn't call it a seminar. We met once a month. The topic was the impact of feminist scholarship on our disciplines. The task we undertook was to read feminist scholarship and see what it had to say to us. Since I was trained completely innocent of thinking about this, I'm happy to say that I didn't have to answer that question for quite a long time. Each of us took a turn and we'd talk of the impact of feminist scholarship in history, psychology, anthropology. We also invited some women at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences who gave some reports on sociology and things like that. 

[We were thinking about] … what difference does it make that the human subject is male or female, biologically, and has a different socialization? What difference does it make to the way we understand things? What do you gain by looking at women as different, and what do you theorize as difference?

We became very excited about the fact that a field like literature or political science, which had seemed to have all the thinking already done in it, so to speak, all of a sudden contained an entirely new level of things that nobody had thought about. 

At that time it was possible to read all the books about those subjects in a couple of months, in the old days. This is an origin story. This is a creation myth that you're getting here. Of course it was much more complicated than that, but that's what it felt like at the time. And it was thrilling. 

... We became very excited about the fact that a field like literature or political science, which had seemed to have all the thinking already done in it, so to speak, all of a sudden contained an entirely new level of things that nobody had thought about. It was like finding an oil well in your backyard when you were planting gladioli. Of course you had to dig it out, but boy, what gushed! A lot of people thought it was dirty and horrible, but you thought it was gold, here. It was really exciting. There were enough of us that we could sort of turn each other on.

. . . [It became clear to us that] there was in fact a field of scholarship that we wanted to know about or possibly to contribute to, that it was also going to have a lot of impact—should have—on our curriculum.

... The lecture series, the Jing Lyman series, that came later to be endowed, was tremendously successful, because it showcased people doing what the CROW Group was doing. They were lectures about the impact of feminist scholarship on the disciplines, or what difference does it make to think about women, or images of women, and what we think about it and who wrote them, and so on.

. . . And it fostered bringing together interdisciplinary groups of faculty and it made possible, with the prestige and space it had, the development of the Feminist Studies Program ....

MARILYN YALOM, whose PhD in Comparative Literature was from Johns Hopkins, was Associate and then Deputy Director of CROW/the Institute from 1976 to 1987. She was named its first Senior Scholar in 1987, a position that she still holds at the Michelle Clayman Institute.

I realized that even in my haven of academia, particularly in my haven of academia [at Hayward], there were sexist issues that I was going to have to deal with. It was just about then, I would say, '74, when the Institute was starting. I, of course, had been very connected to the Stanford community through my husband, who was a professor of psychiatry since the early sixties .... So I knew a lot of the players and I had done work both in the humanities and in the social sciences, partly through some of his work, and I think that's probably why I was an attractive candidate for the Institute's position. So it did mean, in my case, giving up a tenured professorship for taking up a half-time position; my first position at the Institute was as a senior research associate, and it was a half-time position with a three-year term. Then if indeed it was a success, the understanding was that I would stay on, and I would have a more upper directorial administrative role. In fact, that happened before even the three years were over, when I became the Deputy Director. ...

The first year it was really clear that this was a fledgling organization that was going to sink or swim depending upon building faculty support, getting financial support.

... The first year it was really clear that this was a fledgling organization that was going to sink or swim depending upon building faculty support, getting financial support.

... [W]hen I think of those years, in some ways they were the most difficult, but they were the most rewarding—the late seventies, the early eighties. There was a group of faculty—you could count one or two, or in one case three in each department. And they were isolated from the other members of their department to the extent that they were concerned with feminist issues.

KAREN OFFEN received her Stanford PhD in History in 1971. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 1995, she is a Senior Scholar at the Clayman Institute .

I was not working in feminist scholarship then [in the late 1960s] because to even choose a women's topic was considered a very risky and daring thing to do...

I was not working in feminist scholarship then [in the late 1960s] because to even choose a women's topic was considered a very risky and daring thing to do in the History Department here at Stanford at that time. So I did a very traditional dissertation. But as soon as I had finished ... it was really the beginning of the new wave of the women's movement .... I was married; at that time I had one little child with another one on the way and I had always been very keenly interested in the question of women and what the obstacles were that kept them from achieving ... So once I got the degree I decided I was a free agent who could work on anything l wanted, and I immediately turned from French political history to trying to find out whether there had been a women's movement in France in the late nineteenth century, about which there was practically nothing in any of the textbooks or any of the studies I had been reading for years.

... I was coming back and forth to Stanford using the library, but I didn't really know any of the younger feminist scholars. Then I read in the newspaper that the Center for Research on Women was going to be established. ... I was there at the opening ceremonies ....

… But it wasn't until 1978 ... that I became an Affiliated Scholar. ...

... I was the second Affiliated Scholar to be appointed, in late December 1978; the first one was a woman from Berkeley who has since died, so I'm now what you'd call the senior old CROW Affiliate, and have been more or less continuously involved with the Institute since then.

SUSAN GROAG BELL, an historian and independent scholar whose connection to CROW /the Institute began in 1977, is a Senior Scholar at the Clayman Institute. 

The whole point about Affiliated Scholars is always that one is connected with the Center or Institute and one is doing one's own research. This evolved naturally. At the beginning we didn't have regular seminars. We simply were given the opportunity to come and participate in the faculty seminars, which I think were not even held regularly, or at the most, once a month, if that ... It was simply a way, it seems to me, to swell the numbers of people actually doing research on women.

... [I]t was wonderful to meet people, for all of us, even for the very few who were there at the beginning, to meet other people whose main concentrated effort was on women, from whatever discipline. I think we learned a great deal from each other.

... If we go anywhere else in the country or abroad, if you say that you are affiliated with the Institute ... first of all, all kinds of doors open, but you also meet people who already know somebody there and so you can immediately connect with someone whom you ... might like to meet.

... The atmosphere, the environment, during those early years was quite wonderful. It had a tremendous impact on all of us connected with it.

... Over the years I have learned a lot from other people who have produced different new ideas in feminist research and feminist theories.

EDIE GELLES, a historian of colonial America and women, whose affiliation with the Institute dates back to 1983, is a Senior Scholar at the Clayman Institute.

By the time I arrived at CROW, I had written a biography of Abigail Adams that had been at Harvard Press for a year. I thought they were going to publish it, and instead I got a rejection.

... At the time, CROW ... had a Biography Project ... and I had a biography dilemma. I didn't know how I was going to proceed with this. And at the same time ... three biographies about Abigail Adams appeared. It was crushing to me, because I didn't know what I was going to do with my scholarship. However, several scholars said to me, "Edie, there are conferences... " Karen [Offen] and Sue [Bell] both said, "You've got to go to conferences." So I started writing papers about Abigail Adams and taking them to conferences...they were topical papers, focused on one episode in her life.

…At the same time ... Gloria Hall was here ... she's a poet and she teaches English .... Gloria had said, "Contact my editor." This was another way in which someone at the Institute helped me. I talked to the editor, mentioning that I had a new idea about how to do a biography, which is to do it topically as opposed to chronologically ... and she said, "That sounds like a good idea. Send me a couple of chapters and a proposal." So I did and just in weeks I got a book contract. That wouldn't have happened elsewhere. The chapters that I wrote all used feminist theory that I learned here ... in an environment where you could expound on some unusual, creative kinds of scholarship that aren't traditional. ...

[T]his unusual biography, which I wrote at the Institute ... is absolutely a product of doing women's history here at the Institute. I can't imagine it coming out of any other kind of environment.

... [T]his unusual biography, which I wrote at the Institute ... is absolutely a product of doing women's history here at the Institute. I can't imagine it coming out of any other kind of environment. And that book won a prize from the American Historical Association ... for the best book by an independent scholar. And that was good for the Institute ... really good for me too. 

... [H]ow did my involvement at the Institute affect my scholarship? For my scholarship it has been indispensable.

LARAINE ZAPPERT completed her Ph. at Cornell on women in Latin America. She came to Stanford in 1978 as a clinical psychologist at the Cowell Student Health Center. In 1993 she became Stanford's first sexual harassment coordinating advisor and is currently an adjunct clinical professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. 

I came to Stanford, actually, as the first research scholar at CROW, and that was my first appointment at Stanford. It was basically to develop research on women, and specifically for a [funded] research project that I was bringing with me, on work, women and mental health.

It was an extraordinary experience for people to cross disciplines and to learn about what was going on in other departments. It was a very empowering situation for a lot of women.

... I was brand new to the university, so I wasn't really clear where else women faculty would meet and talk about their research. But one of the things that I found to be enormously helpful and very bonding for women was something called the CROW Group .... We used to meet once a month... and women would present their research. So if you were in history, you would present your research; if you were in psychology, you would present your research; if you were in physics, you presented your research, or even a discussion about women in physics, or issues like that. It was an extraordinary experience for people to cross disciplines and to learn about what was going on in other departments. It was a very empowering situation for a lot of women.

BARBARA GELPI was the editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 1980 to 1985, when the journal was housed at CROW. She is an Emerita Professor of English. 

In the fall of 1979, Myra Strober, then the Director of CROW, who was in touch with centers for research for women all over the nation, learned that the Signs editorship was going to rotate from its first home at Barnard College, where Catharine Stimpson was its founding editor. [Myra] felt that CROW should put in a bid for the journal. ... At a meeting about how best to present our case to Chicago, Nan Keohane, Estelle Freedman, and Shelly Rosaldo agreed to be part of an editorial team along with Myra, but as all of them were full-time faculty members, they couldn't take on the editorship itself. As a part-time lecturer at that point, and as someone with editorial experience, I could do it. Carol Jacklin in psychology and Margery Wolf in anthropology rounded out the team. Ah, it was a great group! ... Weeks went by and we didn't hear anything. In late January, I found some excuse to phone Chicago. And I still remember Jean Sack's gravelly voice—she smoked a lot—when she said, "Of course, you got it!"

... There were all kinds of problems. A lot ... were flow, and managerial problems about getting the staff organized. At one point—from my old Jungian days—I rolled the I Ching ... about the Signs situation and [I remember] getting the reading: "The rooftree is bending and is about to break; get help."

But meanwhile we were thinking up projects for special issues. One of the first was on feminist theory, a special issue with Shelly Rosaldo and Nan Keohane as guest editors. With the staff—the managing editor [Clare Novak], and assistant editor [Susan Johnson]—we'd meet at least every six weeks or so for brainstorming sessions, and we got a lot of ideas started.

... I can remember the meetings as a very much back-and-forth sharing of different possibilities and ideas. One of the things was that we had done that for years and we did know each other, and we also respected and trusted each other. There was a lot of trust. We were really open to each other's ideas and didn't put each other down. There were different gifts.

CAROLYN LOUGEE CHAPPELL, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, came to Stanford in 1973 as the first tenure-track woman in the History Department. Among other academic posts, she has served as Dean of Undergraduate Studies and as Chair of the History Department.

CROW was ... a sort of lifeline for women faculty members, and it was a period when there weren't very many—we were scattered. It was CROW that brought people together. ... CROW was ... in a little house ... that was very comfortable within the large and impersonal university, and that was something new. Women being here on the faculty was new ... and there was just a different and welcoming style to CROW. There was this sense of not so much being outsiders as just finding each other, and leading the discussions that took place there. I thought that gave a lot of energy to the place .

CROW was ... a sort of lifeline for women faculty members, and it was a period when there weren't very many—we were scattered. It was CROW that brought people together.

…In a way, less has changed than I would have thought twenty years ago when I came, and fifteen years ago when we started Feminist Studies.

…I wouldn't have believed that there would be so little integration of women and gender into most of the classes in the humanities and social sciences as there has been. I wouldn't have believed that there would be so much opportunity for somebody who didn't have a "special interest" in women, to go through a Stanford education and just not encounter, except [in] one class, the issues of women and gender. I would have thought that there would have been more of a change. I also would have thought that the composition of classes would change more than it has. We still get mostly women. In the last two years I've taught two women's history classes and ... last year I had one male, actually, two males last year, and one this year. So it's like that, just the way it was twenty years ago. Now, there must be some classes in which it's different ....