Karen E. Rowe
Director, 1984 - 1988

Founding director Karen Rowe worked with staff, faculty, and students to develop a range of programs at the CSW, including colloquia, graduate student grant support, faculty/curriculum transformation projects, affiliated scholars' programs, and conferences. Under Rowe's leadership, the CSW received grants and support from the Ford Foundation, California Council for the Humanities, NEH, Gould Foundation, and the AAC Consortium. A landmark volume in the area of curriculum transformation, Women of Color and the Multicultural Curriculum: Transforming the College Classroom (edited by Liza Fiol-Matta and Mariam K. Chamberlain), included several CSW research projects funded by the Ford Foundation. The many events sponsored and cosponsored by the CSW in its formative years included a conference entitled The Dark Madonna: Women, Culture, and Community Rituals; the Women in Science Colloquium Series; Women: Culture, Conflict, and Consensus, the inaugural conference of the California Council of Women's Programs; and the Women: Culture and Society public lecture series. The CSW also created the first Friends of the Center support group during Rowe's tenure and participated (along with the Center for Asian American Studies and UC Asia Institute) in the first international exchange with Ewha Woman's University.

Rowe is a Professor of English at UCLA. She came to UCLA soon after receiving her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1971. Rowe received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982 and served as Chair of the Faculty from 1999 to 2003. Her courses include gender, genre, and culture (mainly seventeenth- to eighteenth-century American literature) and seminars on women and creativity.

Accomplishments: 1984 to 1986

The Center for the Study of Women (CSW) was officially authorized by the Board of Regents on September 21, 1984, becoming the first organized research unit (ORU) in the University of California system to develop and coordinate research on women and gender related issues.

During its first two years, despite the rigors of developing, equipping, housing, staffing, and organizing a new research center, the CSW cosponsored or sponsored six major symposia, contributed funds for two others, mounted a Women's History Week photo exhibit in Powell Library, publised a quarterly newsletter, and coordinated a major reception with the Wight Art Gallery.

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.

Funded in part by the California Council for the Humanities, CSW's most ambitious and successful event in its early years was a conference entitled The Dark Madonna: Women, Culture, and Community Ritual, held in November of 1985. The project yielded a city-wide series of dialogues on relationships among ethnic women and a performance, directed by Suzanne Lacy, in the Franklin S. Murphy Sculpture Garden,which was attended by more than 1500 people.

1986 to 1987

1987 to 1988

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).

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).

The Affiliated Scholars program, which began its second year in 1988, 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.

In June, 1988, Constance Coiner was awarded the first Mary Wollstonecraft Award, which was created through the generosity of Dr. Barbara "Penny" Kanner.