October 3, 2104--Gloria Steinem's Legacy

Gloria Steinem turned 80 recently (everyone says still looks no more than 65). Partly in acknowledgment of that and also because she was and continues to be a major figure in the history of the Women's Liberation Movement, Rutgers University's Institute for Women's Leadership raised money from a variety of sources to endow a chair, a professorship in her name. It will be in the fields of media, culture, and feminist studies.

Everyone in attendance when the chair was announced (this did not include Ms. Steinem) felt it was not only well deserved but important.

As the director of the Institute, Alison Bernstein said, as Steinem turned 80, "what struck me profoundly was that there needed to be a legacy. When you do a chair you basically are saying this is a curriculum that needs permanence, it isn't going to go away." (My italics)

I worked for and with Dr. Bernstein during her and my days at the Ford Foundation. From her I inherited the women's studies portfolio of grants and an initiative that sought to see mainstream into the undergraduate curriculum some of what scholarship had learned during the preceding few decades about women's history and their many contributions to culture and the larger society.

Mainstreaming suggested that some of the earlier battles to support women's studies research had been won--women's studies programs and courses were by the 1990s widespread in academia and it was time, Ford and leaders in the field felt, to move from separate-and-more-or-less equal status to a permanent place in the undergraduate program.

In other words, in contradiction to what Alison Bernstein said last week at Rutgers, there isn't a pressing need now to endow a chair in women's studies as an expression of legacy or to assure permanence. Permanence's goal should be just what that old Ford initiative was about--to become part of the core curriculum, to move in from the margins. Not to continue to construct separate-but-equal realities.

Honor Gloria Steinem for certain--fund scholarships in her name for women and men, offer her honorary degrees, name classrooms for her, feature her work in special programs that chart the history of late 20th century feminism, but resist the temptation to make permanent separate streams of academic research and instruction.

The work still remaining to be completed to foster women's equality is to press the fight for equal pay, challenge corporations to continue to promote more women to the executive suite, and elect more women to Congress and, perhaps soon, to the White House.

But little of this agenda is appropriate for the university. It is up to women and men in all facets of life to join in actions designed to breach these final barriers.