Women's Studies at Club Fair

This Friday, September 2, 2011, Women’s Studies students and faculty will be out at Club Fair for the fifth year in a row.  We made our Club Fair debut five years ago with an activity that I have warned  students about during the first week of Women’s Studies 101 every semester since. 

On August 25, 2006, the day before Women’s Equality Day, I asked my WMST 101 students a few key questions about American Women’s History and showed them this video clip to let them know some consequences of not knowing their own history.  After seeing the video, students in the class decided to circulate the same petition at Club Fair that afternoon to see if their peers knew more than the High School students in the clip. 

It still saddens me to report that approximately 160 RU students signed a petition to “end Women’s Suffrage” that day; even worse: most of them were women.  Despite the fact that many of the students in my class did not know when American Women got the right to vote, or what the word “suffrage” meant, the students who took the petition out to Club Fair were still shocked by the number of people who were willing to sign it.  Apparently, folks at The Tartan were appalled, as well, as they ran this story soon after:

Women’s Studies Club has moved on to a far more diverse array of activities since our beginnings in the Spring of 2006, many of which we will highlight at our table on Friday, but I will always look back on our first Club Fair with a sense of pride … and shock.

For more information about the Radford University Women’s Studies Club, you can visit our Club Fair table, find us on RU Involved, check out our website, like us on facebook, or email us at ruwomen@radford.edu.

Women’s Equality Day

August 26, the anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th amendment, was declared Women’s Equality Day by congress in 1971.

Presidents from Nixon to Obama have issued proclamations asking Americans to remember where we’ve been, and to recognize where we need to go, as we celebrate this historic amendment and the work it took to get it passed in 1920. 

This morning I watched, and cheered, as one of RU Women Studies’ “founding mothers”, Dr. Hilary Lips, accepted the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences Distinguished Scholarship Award for an impressive body of feminist work. 

That somebody is both doing and being rewarded for gender research shows how far women have come.  The focus of much of Dr. Lips’ most recent work, the gender pay gap, however, tells us how far we still have to go. 

While I don’t expect many of us will shoot off fireworks, dedicate statues, or cut a cake (with the exception of another of our founding mothers, Dr. Moira Baker, whose birthday appropriately falls on Women’s Equality Day), I do hope that we can all take a moment to reflect on what “equality” means and how we might get there.  

I will be “celebrating” by preparing to teach my 12^th semester of Women’s Studies 101.  I generally start the course with “the good news”: documentaries such as One Woman, One Vote, an uplifting clip like “We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants”, and articles like “A Day Without Feminism” to let them know about the hard work that’s been done to get them where they are today.  The follow-up, for many of my students, however, is seen as “the bad news”: the pay gap, racism, sexual assault and domestic violence, women being silenced both locally and globally. 

The task I’m giving myself for both Women’s Equality Day, and the rest of the semester, is a small one:  I am going to try my best to get my students – and myself – to recall the “good news” when the “bad news” seems overwhelming. 

How Will You Celebrate Women’s Equality Day?

Reflecting on Women's Studies

At the end of every semester of Women’s Studies 101, students are asked to reflect on the following questions:

What is Women's Studies?  What difference does it make?

As we kickoff both the Fall 2011 semester and our Women’s Studies Blog, we thought it would be interesting to hear from Women’s Studies Faculty, Staff, and Students how Women’s Studies has shaped your knowledge of, and perspective on, women’s lives.


We look forward to your responses!