Women's and Gender Studies celebrates 30 years at MU

The university's first Women Studies class was taught in 1971.

By Jimmy Hibsch

Published Oct. 19, 2010

Just as MU has seen a major growth in women enrollment throughout the past 30 years, Women’s and Gender Studies Department Chairwoman Mary Jo Neitz said the same has happened for her department.

On Monday, the department celebrated 30 years at MU at the Alumnae Anniversary Fund Dinner. Hosted in Stotler Lounge, the event featured a dinner for more than 120 people involved with the department.

“It’s kind of a celebration of people who have contributed to the department, graduated from it or supported it in one way or another,” Neitz said.

Neitz, Ellen McLain, co-chairwoman for the Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of Women, and College of Arts and Science Dean Michael O’Brien welcomed the guests to the dinner and commemorated the department’s achievement.

“We can focus on how far we have to go and how many things need to be done and problems that we all still have,” McLain said. “But if you look at how far we’ve come, from what I perceive as a short time, this certainly is something to celebrate.”

During his welcome, O’Brien tackled some speculation as to whether the program will be cut. He said the program will remain at MU, using the three newly-filled positions in the department as validation.

“The Women’s and Gender Studies department shows what can happen when a loyal group of faculty and staff come together and say this is something that is important to us,” he said.

MU approved the Women Studies degree program in 1980, but Neitz said the first Women's Studies course was offered through the Honors College in 1971. The course dealt exclusively with women and their roles in society.

The Association of Women Students’ Commission on the Status of Women envisioned the class, which was taught by several instructors, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Neitz said this presented a unique circumstance -- the initiative had not been established by faculty members or administrators, but rather by students. The women produced a report underlining what they believed was important about the curriculum and presented it to the university. The department recently found the original report, Neitz said.

“I love telling the story about how the class came to be,” Neitz said.

Before the focus’ inception as an officially-recognized degree program, instructors for the classes had been borrowed from other departments, Neitz said.

“Sooner or later, though, you want independence,” she said. “You don’t want to be dependent on another department to teach your courses. It was a big deal when we were established as a program.”

An employee of the department since 1980, Neitz has seen the program’s evolution firsthand. She said one of the program’s initial goals was to find a prospective faculty member who understood and could lecture on women of color.

“We wanted to be sure that we had that element in the program,” Neitz said. “If you want to study women, you have to be interested in race and class as well — that was a sign that that commitment was there from the beginning.”

Neitz said another prominent milestone for the department was the 2003 addition of “Gender Studies” to the program’s title. This change reflected a slight alter in emphasis, she said.

“It signified a little bit of a change in focus and politics outside of the university,” she said. “The emphasis became the relationship between genders, rather than just women per se.”

Neitz said after the name change, the program began to focus on women’s relations with men as well.

All of these events led up to the eventual declaration of the program as an official department in 2007, Neitz said.

“In the past five years, we’ve been becoming a department and really solidifying the inward agenda, but I think that in the next five years we’ll be looking to make more connections with other departments and to kind of reinvigorate that outward focus,” she said.