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| 1984 to 1986 |
The Center for the Study of Women (CSW) was officially authorized by the Board of Regents on September 21, 1984. Upon its establishment, the CSW became the first organized research unit in the University of California system to develop and coordinate research on women and gender related issues. Karen E. Rowe, Associate Professor of English, was the CSW's first director, serving from 1984-1988.
During its first two years (1984-1986), despite the rigors of developing, equipping, housing, staffing and organizing a new research center, the CSW cosponsored or sponsored a total of six major symposia, contributed funds for two others, mounted a Women's History Week photo exhibit in Powell, inaugurated publication of its quarterly Newsletter, and coordinated a major reception with the Wight Art Gallery.
The CSW also sponsored or cosponsored over fifty speakers, including those who contributed to the Women in Science Colloquium Series (1984-85) and the Women, Culture and Theory Colloquium (1985-85). Prestigious speakers included economist Heidi Hartmann, historian Gerda Lerner, philosopher Virginia Held, literary critic Catharine Stimpson, poets Judy Grahn and Adrienne Rich, feminist theologian Carol Ochs, and the founder and editor of The Feminist Press, Florence Howe.
The CSW's most ambitious and successful event in its early years, funded in part by the California Council for the Humanities, was a conference entitled The Dark Madonna: Women, Culture, and Community Rituals, held in November of 1985. The "Dark Madonna" project yielded a city-wide series of dialogues on relationships among ethnic women and a performance, directed by Suzanne Lacy, in the Murphy Sculpture Garden, attended by 1500 to 2000 people. |
| 1986 to 1987 |
As the founder of the California Council of Women's Programs, in 1986-1987 UCLA became the campus to host the inaugural Council research conference on "Women: Culture, Conflict, and Consensus" that engaged over seventy UC faculty and graduate students and an audience of 450 in a complex analysis of ethnicity, gender, and cultural change. The Center for the Study of Women took the lead in planning this conference, which featured plenary speakers Bettina Aptheker (Women's Studies, UC Santa Cruz), Barbara Christian (Afro-American Studies, UC Berkeley), Aihwa Ong (Anthropology, UC Berkeley), Judith Stacey (Sociology, UC Davis), and Patricia Zavella (Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz). Taking place during February 1987, papers from this conference were edited by Emily Abel for a special issue of Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
In May of 1987, CSW cosponsored the Women at Work conference with the Institute of Industrial Relations and the Institute of Social Science Research. This one-day conference, featuring twenty-two speakers and seven moderators, sought to interpret the changing roles of women in the workplace from a variety of research perspectives. Attendance was limited to 200, with another seventy-five turned away because of space limitations.
In 1987-1988, CSW also hosted a Faculty Research Seminar on Women, co-chaired by Ruth Bloch (History) and Gary Richwald (Public Health), and a public lecture series, entitled Women: Culture and Society, targeted to a broad campus and public audience. Speakers (of eighteen total) included Barbara Solomon (History and Education, Harvard), Gerda Lerner (History, University of Wisconsin), Alice Jardine (Literature, Harvard), Anne Firor Scott (History, Duke), and Phyllis Mack (History, Rutgers).
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| 1987 to 1988 |
In 1987-1988 CSW completed its third full year of operation with a new maturity in programs, staff growth and reorganization, success in garnering external research funding, and heightened national and international visibility. CSW event highlights included the following:
In November of 1987, CSW coordinated the conference Older Women: Creative Alternatives in Health and Housing, which addressed the important issue of what happens to housing and health for older women when health policy makes the home increasingly the site for delivery of long term care. The plenary featured noted health specialists and urban planners, Meredith Minkler, Julia Thomas, and Jacqueline Leavitt, and ten workshops on a range of pertinent topics involved eighteen presenters/workshop leaders from academia and from the community.
In January 1988, CSW featured The Way We Look, The Way We See: Art Criticism for Women in the '90s, a conference examining movements in feminist criticism of the arts from the sixties to the nineties, interrogating theories of postmodern, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic esthetics. A screening and critique of Chantal Akerman's Toute Une Nuit and an exhibit of Image & Text at the Woman's Building accompanied the symposium, which featured eighteen panelists and over 300 participants.
CSW hosted and participated in planning the annual meeting of the National Council for Research on Women, entitled Difference and Diversity: Implications for Research on Women, which brought together nearly fifty national leaders in a series of panels and workshops designed to set research agendas for the nineties.
The Center held six seminars, as part of the Faculty Research Seminar on Women, which focused discussion on pre-distributed papers in relationship to broad interdisciplinary questions of public policy, cross-cultural comparisons, feminist theory, and women's studies research methods.
Together with affiliated campus units, CSW co-sponsored Women: Culture and Society: A Public Lecture Series. This speaker series drew national visiting speakers, including feminist author Mary Gordon, activists Betty Friedan and Flo Kennedy, philosophers, Mary Daly and Riane Eisler, sociologists Barrie Thorne and Cheris Kramarae, and historian Yolande Cohn, and drew audiences between fifty and 300.
In 1988, ten papers presented at a previous CSW conference were published in a volume titled Women at Work (co-published with the Institute of Industrial Relations).
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| 1988 to 1989 |
Under the leadership of founding Director Karen Rowe until December 1988, and interim acting co-directors Letitia Anne Peplau (Psychology) and Carrie Menkel-Meadow (Law) for the second half of the academic year, CSW broadened and deepened its reach on campus in its fourth full year to explore issues of gender in the production of knowledge, organizing a new directory of the over 150 scholars who conduct research on women and gender at UCLA.
The Affiliated Scholars program, which began its second year in 1988-89, brought independent scholars and junior faculty conducting research on women and gender to participate in UCLA's Women's Studies community by offering these scholars library privileges, stationary, and assistance with developing funding proposals.
Jointly with the Center for Pacific Rim Studies, CSW organized the EWHA-UCLA Cooperative Research and Faculty Exchange "The Status of Women in Korea and the United States." This exchange, which consisted of two intensive workshops with faculty from UCLA and Ewha Women's University in Seoul, Korea, examined the status of women using cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and comparative perspectives.
Together with the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, the Women's Studies Program, and the Gender and Politics Project, CSW cosponsored the Capitalist Development and Women's Liberation Conference, held on May 15, 1989. This conference, which close to 200 people attended, featured individual presentations and panel discussions on women and Third World development, the origin of women's oppression in capitalist societies, and women's current economic and social status.
CSW also helped to organize a three-year series of interdisciplinary programs on gender and politics, directed by Professor Ellen DuBois (History). In May 1989, the Gender and Politics group brought Dr. Heidi Hartmann, former director of Women's Studies at Rutgers and currently Director of the Institute for Women's Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. to campus to discuss feminist research being conducted outside universities.
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| 1989 to 1990 |
In its fifth full year, the number of faculty and graduate students affiliated with the Center grew, extramural funding continued at an encouragingly high level for a new center, and a wide variety of lectures and conferences provided ways for UCLA scholars to learn about new scholarship and to disseminate their own work.
The CSW applied to and was funded by the Ford Foundation for an endeavor called the Ford Ethnic Women's Curriculum Transformation Project (or FEW), a programmatic effort to focus research on ethnic women. In 1999 FEW offered curriculum development seminars for faculty and graduate students, including seminars in Psychology and cognate fields, History, and interdisciplinary studies.
In addition to the Feminist Research Seminar (formerly called the Faculty Research Seminar on Women) and the Public Lecture Series, CSW facilitated numerous events in its fifth year, including a one-day symposium on domestic labor, entitled A Conference on Domestic Workers: Feminist Perspectives, co-presented by the Gender and Politics Project, in May 1990. CSW also cosponsored (with the 1789/1989 French Revolution Bicentennial Program) the Women and the French Revolution Conference, held on October 20-21, 1990, and cosponsored (with the Center of Pacific Rim Studies) an international workshop entitled The Construction of Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asia, a workshop that brought together an interdisciplinary group of fifteen Asian and North American scholars over three days (December 9-11th, 1990).
The CSW also sponsored two large events for graduate students in 1989-1990, a faculty panel and discussion session entitled On the Cutting Edge: Feminist Research Today on February 26, which attracted over seventy-five graduate students, and a series of five practical workshops entitled Career Strategies, held on April 24th. |
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