00:00:01.160 - 00:00:15.790

So, hi, professor, I was hoping you could... Hello. ...just introduce yourself first. Ok. My name is Cindy Gissendanner and I'm a professor in the Women's and Gender

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Studies department at Towson. Yeah, my name is Mira Levin-Antila. I'm a senior conducting my honors independent archival study focusing on the Towson University Women's Studies Archives.

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It's April 25th at 1:07 PM. So I was just hoping could you share what initially drew you to the field of women's studies? Well, I went to, I went to Vassar College, which is a, historically was a women's

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college. And while I was there, I was a history major and there was a professor there who taught a course on the history of women in America. And I took that course.

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I think that was the first women's history course I took. And then I became interested in women's studies generally and I took a number of other women's studies courses while I was at college. And I think part of my motivation too, was that I had...

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I'd been involved in sports in high school and, you know, being a female athlete at that time was not exactly the, you know, the thing to do, so to speak. And there were a lot of inequalities in how girls' sports was treated compared to

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the boys' sports teams in high school. And I was also an athlete in college and I just noticed, you know, discrimination, basically, on the basis of sex in sports. And that kind of also, I think, was a factor in becoming conscious of,

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you know, inequalities. So you mentioned that you studied history. What kind of history did you study? Well, I was mostly... In college, of course,

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we kind of had to do a bunch of different courses, you know, kind of a distribution system where you had to take certain number of courses in different areas. But when I went to graduate school, I focused in on U.S.

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history and specifically U.S. women's history. My advisor in graduate school was a women's historian. Her name was Carol Smith Rosenberg. She was one of the early sort of women's historians in the... This would be in the

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late 1970s. So yeah, that's what I focused in on. So you mentioned being an athlete. I wanted to ask, were there any pivotal moments that kind

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of solidified your commitment to the fields of women's studies? To be honest, I graduated from college and I really didn't know what I wanted to do. And I had done a thesis in college on history of women

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in sports. And my advisor, you know, was the women's historian at Towson, or at Vassar. And she, you know, I talked with her.

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She told me... I didn't really, to be honest, I didn't know what a PhD was at the time. I didn't know anything about graduate school. She recommended that, you know, I look into it. And so I applied for graduate programs where there were people in the field,

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you know, that were there that could sort of direct, like, if I was going to do a dissertation, I needed, you know, I was looking for schools that had people on the faculty who were specialists in women's history.

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And yeah, so when I got admitted to the... I went to the University of Pennsylvania where Carol Smith Rosenberg was located, I decided to go for it 'cause I didn't know what else to do, to be honest. I really didn't have other things in mind.

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And when I started college, I wanted to be, I thought I wanted to be, like, pre-med. I wanted to be a doctor. And I just wasn't interested in the science

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courses as much as I was history. So... So did you initially apply to be a pre- med student and then it shifted eventually to history?

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Well, yeah. I mean, I initially was taking courses that would prepare me to, you know, to be, like, pre-med, but it only took a few of them to make me realize that really wasn't my passion, so...

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Shifting a little bit, I wanted to ask, in your opinion, how has the academic field of women's studies changed since you joined Towson's faculty? A lot.

00:06:03.360 - 00:06:29.120

So, when I joined Towson's faculty, I would say that women's studies as a discipline was very underdeveloped still, in that there were... I mean, Towson actually had one of the earliest programs in women's and gender studies in the country.

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I mean, like, second or third to have a program. And many universities didn't have faculty who were like, you know, women's and gender studies. There were almost no women's...

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I don't know if there were any women's and gender studies departments when I started. Most of the women who did... Women and I guess there were a few men, but it was mostly women, who did women's studies as scholars were located in other

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disciplines, right? So, like, the people who did women's history were in history departments and the people who did literature were in English departments. And there wasn't really... You know, one of the things that's changed

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dramatically is that many universities now have women's and gender studies departments and the faculty, you know, more recently there have been, you know, there's more opportunity for people to actually get PhDs in women's and gender studies.

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And so their field is women's and gender studies. They're not, like, coming at it from a different discipline. And that's... I mean, what that shows about the field is that the field has really developed its own, you know, theoretical frameworks,

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methodologies, ways of approaching the study of women. And also many women's, what were originally women's studies departments, most of them have like transitioned into being women's and gender studies or women's, gender and sexuality studies.

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So that the conception of what the field entails has also changed to looking at not just women's lives, but also, like, the structures of gender and sexuality and how those impact women's lives. And, of course, the other thing that's changed

00:09:03.720 - 00:09:38.080

dramatically is the level of intersectional thinking about women's lives that, you know, was introduced, of course, mostly by women of color, feminists who have really pioneered that work of broadening the, you know, how the category 'woman' is defined and the need to not present that as kind of a

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universal category. When did you join Towson faculty? 1984. OK.

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And I know one of the classes that you teach is feminist theory. Yes. Adding on to that, I wanted to know if you have seen any shifts specifically in feminist theory since you started teaching.

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Yes, actually, they're pretty related to what I was just talking about. There's, you know, not the, I mean, Kimberly Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality, you know,

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she kind of coined the term. But leading up even to her introduction of intersectionality as a concept, there were a lot of women of color, feminists who really from the late 19th, well, maybe even the early 19th century on had, you know, had theorized this,

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these intersecting structures of gender and race and class, and specifically looked at how those impact the lives of women of color. For example, the Combahee River Collective statement, which was a statement, really, of intersectional analysis that preceded

00:11:14.200 - 00:11:37.970

Kimberly Crenshaw's kind of pointing at the term. But we can go way back and see feminists who are not in positions of, you know, feminists who are marginalized or belong to different marginalized groups based on class, race, religion sometimes, depending, you know,

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women were thinking about this. Feminists were thinking about this for a very long time. And not just... There were also, of course, male feminists who were thinking about these things for a long time and thinking about it not just in terms of identity

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issues, but also, like, these structural problems that impact individuals lives whose identities reflect those multiple systems of power. So could you talk about being director of the LGBTQ+ minor and how it actually

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became housed within the broader women's studies department? Yeah, sure. So the LGBTQ studies minor... We were, like, Towson was the first institution in the US, in the state of Maryland, to have an LGBTQ studies program,

00:12:42.350 - 00:13:03.580

like, that had either a minor, we don't have a major, we still don't have a major. But we were the first university in the USM, in the University System of Maryland to have a program that involved a minor that

00:13:03.580 - 00:13:19.910

students could get. At the time when the minor was created, it had to go through the Maryland Higher Education Commission to be approved. And we had enough faculty in different departments, like women's and gender

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studies at the time. And we had people in different departments teaching courses within particular disciplines. I taught an LGBTQ history class and David Bergman taught classes in English

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on LGBT literature. There were a couple of psych classes, psychology classes. One was Psychology of Lesbian Culture. Barbara Slater taught it.

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There are three courses in psych and there was a course in anthropology. Now, when we first started teaching, some of the courses didn't actually have LGBTQ in the title because some students didn't want to have anything related, you know, that said LGBT on their transcripts.

00:14:15.720 - 00:14:37.540

It was prior to, like, the real sort of explosion of the LGBTQ rights movement. And so there was still a lot of closeted faculty and students who were teaching in the program. So that was, you know, that was obviously a different time. Now,

00:14:37.540 - 00:14:58.400

how it came to be in the women's and gender studies department, because initially it was housed in interdisciplinary studies as an interdisciplinary program. So when I became chair of Women's and Gender Studies in 2012, and I was the

00:14:58.400 - 00:15:19.710

director of the LGBT studies minor at that time, I immediately thought I would like to have it moved to be sort of part of the Women's and Gender Studies program. So I thought, well, you know, if we bring it into the department,

00:15:19.710 - 00:15:36.550

maybe it'll be, it'll have, like, a more clear presence and visibility. And so that's... I basically proposed that it be moved into Women's and Gender Studies because I felt like it was a,

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it was a good fit for it. And I thought it might help, you know, increase the number of people who, number of students who saw it. Yeah, you mentioned being essentially, so, chair

00:15:51.790 - 00:16:15.160

of the LGBTQ studies minor and then head of the Women's Studies department? Director. I was director of LGBT studies minor. It's now... I just put in the paperwork couple years ago for to be called the LGBTQ studies minor, used to be LGBT studies minor.

00:16:15.520 - 00:16:26.720

That was probably around 2010, maybe a little earlier that I became the director of LGBT. What... It was LGBT studies then.

00:16:27.760 - 00:16:53.230

And then I was chair of the Women's and Gender department, Women's and Gender Studies department, from 2012 until 2023, I think. Yeah. So for about eleven years, I think, I was chair of the Women's and

00:16:53.230 - 00:17:10.080

Gender Studies department. So could you tell me a little bit more about being both director of the LGBTQ studies minor and then being chair of the Women's Studies department, that kind of intersection?

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Was it difficult? No, not really. I mean, to me, it's a very, you know, organic kind of collaboration there.

00:17:26.520 - 00:17:57.110

Many of the people who teach LGBT courses also, I mean, a number of people in women's and gender studies taught LGBTQ courses. And most of the people who teach, who taught LGBTQ courses in other departments were also somehow, you know, experts on gender sexuality and sometimes,

00:17:57.110 - 00:18:23.880

you know, feminism and women and so it all... They're... I don't really see it, I didn't really feel any sort of dissonance between the two. There might be tension in some places where the feminists that teach in women's

00:18:23.880 - 00:18:53.990

and gender studies are not particularly accepting, especially of trans folks. That's not been the experience here at Towson. It didn't pose any, you know, problems in terms of integrating the two. So could you talk to me about some of the most impactful experiences you've had as

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a professor at Towson? Well, I've been here for 41 years, so there are a lot. Let's see. So one thing that happened is I was hired in the history department.

00:19:14.360 - 00:19:37.240

That was... I was in the history department, actually, for about 30 years. And then when the chair position in Women's and Gender Studies became open and I, of course, had had sort of a long-term relationship

00:19:37.240 - 00:20:08.590

with women's and gender studies because even when I was in the history department, I had sometimes taught WMST courses and I had served on the Women's and Gender Studies Promotion, Tenure, Retention, Merit committee, especially before they had become a department, because initially they were

00:20:08.590 - 00:20:28.960

a program as well. And so they needed people from other departments to serve on promotion and tenure committees because they didn't have, like, faculty that were specifically hired as women's and gender studies faculty, right?

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So I had, you know, a pretty long-standing relationship with the department. And so when I... So, one of the things that was impactful on me is I changed departments,

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basically. I went from being a history professor to being a women's and gender studies professor, which meant that one of the big changes, one of the things that impacted me there was I basically taught a whole bunch of new courses because I no longer

00:21:03.750 - 00:21:28.080

taught the courses I had created in history, because they, when I left the department, they hired someone else to do those because they still needed someone to teach those history courses. And so my teaching schedule became completely, like, women's studies courses.

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And I had taught the intro course before, but it had been quite a few years since I had taught it. So I taught Women's Studies 231, the intro course, and I had taught, I'd actually taught LGBT 101 before.

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Again, it had been a while since I had done that. And then I created a course called Animal Rights, Human Rights, because that was an interest of mine and Women's and Gender Studies was interested in having me teach it.

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So I created that course in Women's and Gender Studies. I also created a graduate course, well, a combined undergraduate and graduate course called Gender Leadership and Social Justice. And the impact on me was, you know, aside from having to do a lot of work,

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it was that I really got to know the field of women's and gender studies much better than I had before when I was mostly focused on women's and gender studies as, you know, as an historical field rather than, you know, sort of this broader field that I already

00:22:55.720 - 00:23:07.400

talked about, it being like a field that has its own theories, methodologies, substantive knowledge that I was not familiar with. You know, it's an interdisciplinary field.

00:23:07.400 - 00:23:25.720

So it's pretty broad-ranging. And it took a while for me to, like, educate myself enough to be able to teach that kind of interdisciplinary, intersectional material.

00:23:26.720 - 00:23:46.790

So could you tell me about a research project you've led which has been significant to you? Yeah, sure. There's a few. Well, my dissertation in Graduate School was on

00:23:46.790 - 00:24:16.200

the history of women and sports in the United States from 1860 to 1940. And that was, you know, reflective, obviously, of my personal interests as well as my historical interest in women's lives and gender attitudes.

00:24:16.200 - 00:24:44.150

And also incorporated class into it. Looking at, like, how sports are a class phenomenon that, like, certain sports are upper-class and they take place in, particularly in that period, took place in very different settings from what other sports took place in and

00:24:44.150 - 00:25:03.840

opportunity structures were different dependent on one's class and gender obviously. So that was one project and I haven't actually, because I was chair for so long,

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I really haven't... I've done research, but I haven't, it hasn't come to fruition yet. I'm hoping it will in the next few years, but something I've been more recently researching is Amish puppy mills and the debates around how to, you know,

00:25:29.300 - 00:26:06.560

best protect animals from those kinds of abusive environments. But the ways in which sort of religious freedom and the rights of minorities can come into conflict with the rights of animals and how to navigate those conflicts is kind of the center of what I've been thinking about.

00:26:06.560 - 00:26:26.160

I've also been thinking about broadening it to looking at Amish abuse generally against not just animals, but also women and children, because there have been, like... I'm really kind of interested in how the media covers these things.

00:26:27.320 - 00:26:44.920

And the Amish, of course, are at somewhat of a disadvantage in that they don't, you know, part of their religion is basically not to participate in media. So I'm just, yeah, looking at different sort of questions

00:26:44.920 - 00:27:11.050

about how to, how a society can serve the needs and interests of competing, you know, constituencies, if you will. The other research project that I was involved in, and again, may still do something with, but I haven't gotten much

00:27:11.050 - 00:27:43.060

beyond research, is a study of the block in Baltimore, which is, like, kind of like this adult entertainment district in Baltimore. So I looked at, like, sex work and I was doing a social history of the block. So I was looking at who visited the block, how the block became part of, like, sort of

00:27:43.060 - 00:28:07.750

Baltimore's image. Looking also at law enforcement and how law enforcement dealt with, you know, dealt with that district. Looked at how politicians addressed it, tried to, you know,

00:28:07.750 - 00:28:36.920

looked at, like, campaigns to eradicate it, campaigns to regulate it and control it. Looked at tourists, how tourists, you know, tourists came to to the block and also, like, sort of transient populations because sailors, you know, Baltimore's a port.

00:28:37.360 - 00:29:03.200

There was a lot of sailors visited it, college students visited it. People who are kind of, you know, not probably going to stay in Baltimore but are using it sort of in some kind of transitional period in their lives. I wonder if we could go back to your dissertation.

00:29:03.200 - 00:29:22.400

You were talking about studying women in sports. What were some of the most interesting findings, if you can remember? Well, yeah, it's been a while. So I looked at country clubs for the kind of upper-class sports.

00:29:22.760 - 00:29:45.480

And so that was really interesting to see how much, you know, what level of participation women had in, like, Country Club sports and these kinds of networks that were created between athletes who were, you know, engaged in competition between country clubs, right?

00:29:45.480 - 00:30:08.110

So that there was a lot of community really developed around sports for women in these upper class settings. You know, and these are also where, you know, I mean, it's class based in that, you know, the sports that are played in these

00:30:08.110 - 00:30:32.920

places are, you know, tennis, golf, they're the kind of upper class sports which working class people didn't really have access to at the time because there weren't sort of public tennis courts and there weren't, you know, public spaces where people could participate in these kinds of sports.

00:30:32.920 - 00:31:01.170

And so then I looked at sports like basketball and track and field, which were much more accessible to working class people, partially because there developed this whole system of industrial leagues where companies would sponsor teams in track and field and basketball and working

00:31:01.170 - 00:31:18.240

class women could enter competitions between different companies. You know, they were leagues of different industrial companies that, you know, sponsored teams and then the teams would play each other.

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And there were even, in some states, or even, like, state championships for these industrial leagues. And so this became a way for working- class women to enter particular sports and especially track and field, which then developed this structure of

00:31:35.820 - 00:31:56.020

the Amateur Athletic Union began being the pathway to the Olympics, right? So women would get the opportunity to, like, develop skills in these, through these industrial leagues, and then they would have the opportunity to enter AAU competitions with the skills

00:31:56.020 - 00:32:10.680

they had built, which was the pathway to enter the Olympics. Meanwhile, in schools and colleges at the time in the early 20th century, there was a lot of pushback against

00:32:10.680 - 00:32:31.860

highly competitive sports for women. So that schools and colleges often didn't encourage that kind of, you know, interscholastic competition or intercollegiate competition. So that most of the, like, high-powered athletes of the time aren't coming out of,

00:32:31.860 - 00:32:51.840

like, school and college sports programs because those sports programs were more like phys ed rather than, you know, they didn't encourage, like, that kind of high competition that would develop the skills that would be needed for, you know,

00:32:51.840 - 00:33:20.680

to enter into, like, Olympic competition or anything like that. And then there was also, you know, I've found that black women had kind of their own networks and leagues and strategies that allowed them to become by the... And actually their colleges,

00:33:20.680 - 00:33:49.710

there were black colleges that were much more interested in fielding competitive sports teams in track and field. For example, Tuskegee became, like, a real powerhouse for track and field and and then Tennessee State and the early,

00:33:49.710 - 00:34:13.640

the earliest Olympians, black Olympians, Olympians period, from the US, came from Tuskegee and Tennessee State. They were black women because white women's colleges, for the most part, were shunning that kind of high-powered competition.

00:34:14.080 - 00:34:33.540

And Babe Didrikson, who was, you know, an early Olympic star in track and field, white woman from Texas, came to the Olympics through industrial league competition. So there were, you know, it was... Class and race were really

00:34:33.540 - 00:34:47.120

instrumental in shaping, you know, who made it into these kind of high levels of competition. Yeah, kind of following up on that, could you share if there were any kind

00:34:47.120 - 00:35:03.390

of challenging aspects of conducting this research or research in other projects you've been doing? Yeah. Well, the research on the block, you know, is difficult because there's,

00:35:03.390 - 00:35:20.320

you know, particularly in earlier periods that I was looking at, you know, there's a lot of like, it's kind of hard to find primary sources, right? Because there's a lot of, like, not wanting to talk about... I mean,

00:35:20.320 - 00:35:34.070

I could find sensationalistic stuff about the block. You know, there'd be like, oh, they raided it again or something like that. But basically trying to find out what the lives of sex workers were like on the

00:35:34.070 - 00:35:47.540

block, that's, you know, that requires a different kind of research, which I, to be honest, haven't actually gotten into. But if I continue the project, I would want to do try to do some oral

00:35:47.540 - 00:36:05.790

history. But it's difficult because, you know, sex workers on the block from an earlier period, most of them aren't still alive. And at the time, you know, since it was, what they were doing was

00:36:05.790 - 00:36:19.400

illegal, you know, they're not likely to be out there talking about it. So, yeah. So the illicit, you know, what was considered the illicit nature of

00:36:19.400 - 00:36:39.560

the work that sex workers were doing makes, you know, makes it a little difficult. And also the the conditions under which they worked, which generally, you know, don't make for a really long life. Those things, you know, and

00:36:39.560 - 00:37:00.350

they weren't likely to talk about it much at the time that they were doing it. So, that's, you know, kind of a challenge. It's a challenge that anyone who does history of marginalized groups has. It's often harder to find sources that, you know, print sources,

00:37:00.350 - 00:37:20.810

and you have to usually rely to some extent on oral history to the extent that you can. So kind of adding on to, you know, the challenges that you've discovered, how do you navigate being in a field that's often misunderstood by the general

00:37:20.810 - 00:37:31.080

public? If I would say, oh, well, I'm really interested in the history of women in sports. They're like, sometimes they'd say, oh, that's interesting.

00:37:31.080 - 00:37:42.480

But you could tell it's just like, they never thought of that as being history and women's and gender studies. Sometimes people say, well, what is that? What is that?

00:37:42.480 - 00:37:53.360

You know, 'cause they don't even know. They don't even have, like, a reference point from high school. What is women's and gender studies? What do you study?

00:37:53.360 - 00:38:12.030

You know, to the extent that they have a sense of what that might be, I think it's probably mostly like, oh, you must study, like, famous women, right? And I don't think they have much of a sense of it being, like, studying

00:38:12.030 - 00:38:31.440

structures of gender and race and class. And it's intersectional, you know, all of that. That's just not something that the general public has been educated about. So I was wondering if you could talk to me about some of what you believe the

00:38:31.440 - 00:38:47.200

most crucial issues facing women's studies today are and how you might see them being addressed. Well, we're in an interesting time for that question.

00:38:49.160 - 00:39:22.490

Yeah, there's a lot of challenges out there. Reproductive justice, trans women being erased from existence by executive order, trans people generally. Women's and gender studies as a field, then, you know, offers a critique, you know, a way of

00:39:22.490 - 00:39:46.880

talking about these, the harm and the inaccuracy, the misinformation that's behind these policies. It's, you know, like I said, a lot of people are taking women's and gender studies now.

00:39:47.400 - 00:39:59.200

They aren't, you know, we don't have a lot of majors, but we have a lot of people that have taken some course in our department where, you know, and all of our courses are going to be intersectional, interdisciplinary.

00:39:59.200 - 00:40:18.500

They're going to have, you know, they're going to be taught essentially from a feminist, you know, some sort of feminist perspective, probably an intersectional feminist perspective. But I think it's also our function to educate people in ways that give them,

00:40:18.500 - 00:40:43.320

you know, give them ways to counteract these, you know, not just sort of ideologically, but in terms of activism and, you know, and leadership and that kind of knowledge that they need in order to be effective.

00:40:46.080 - 00:41:13.280

Once they have the ideology or once they, you know, are viewing things that way, then they also need, you know, guidance on how to go about making change. And that's also an important aspect of feminist theory and scholarship. Very true.

00:41:13.320 - 00:41:34.560

And it's a couple more years of this, unfortunately, but on a more positive note, on a more positive note, I was wondering if you could share what role you think women's studies plays kind of in broader academia today and maybe

00:41:34.560 - 00:42:05.990

what entices students to take courses. Yeah, I mean, from my own observation of students, I think that they are, you know, most of our students have already, and this is different from when I first started, most of our students, because of,

00:42:05.990 - 00:42:36.610

you know, whether it be in education itself or whether it be through media, social media, have some familiarity with feminism, with, you know, something more than just, like, superficial sort of exposure to feminist ideas or certainly in terms of LGBTQ studies, like,

00:42:36.610 - 00:42:59.160

you know, the the tremendous growth of LGBTQ movements has made a world of difference in terms of when I first taught LGBT courses, I've initially taught LGBT 101 and I also taught an LGBTQ history class.

00:42:59.720 - 00:43:28.110

This would have been probably in the early 1990s when I was doing that. And sometimes I would also include LGBTQ history in my U.S. history class, like my U.S. survey class. And there I would, like, when I would mention anything

00:43:28.110 - 00:43:48.120

LGBTQ, people would, like, laugh nervously. Students. They had never heard anybody say anything publicly about LGBTQ people in history. And it made them nervous.

00:43:48.120 - 00:44:03.240

It was obviously, like, this kind of nervous laughter. Like, how am I supposed to respond to this, right? Because they had never heard it before in school or even in other college courses

00:44:03.240 - 00:44:24.340

probably at that point. And that, of course, is not... That doesn't happen now. Although, to be honest, I'm not teaching general history survey classes, so I don't know, you know, but I'm assuming that with all the

00:44:24.340 - 00:44:46.480

representation that LGBTQ people have now in the media, in social media, you know, the exposure is just so different that, you know, I'm not, I don't get those kinds of like, you know, what is happening sort of reactions in the classroom.

00:44:46.800 - 00:45:10.240

And I think most of the students who take women's and gender studies classes, I mean, there's a different, there're different levels of, like, you know, understanding and exposure because people get their information about LGBTQ topics and feminism from other sources.

00:45:10.440 - 00:45:34.660

And, you know, that might be, well, in particularly in today's society, you know, are all over the place and might be less favorable, but I think most people are motivated by either a curiosity or a genuine, you know, acceptance of the kinds of

00:45:34.660 - 00:45:54.960

perspectives that we offer in our classes. And to me, I mean, most of our, you know, most of our majors are, like, feminists. They're intersectional thinkers. They're, you know, they're not resistant.

00:45:56.320 - 00:46:09.360

I don't meet with much resistance in classes. Occasionally in core classes where people are just taking it sometimes because it's at the right time of day and they aren't really interested.

00:46:09.640 - 00:46:29.760

There could be, you know, I, it's not unheard of to feel resistance, but for the most part, you know, students today are educated about and more accepting, more tolerant than they would have been, you know, 30 years ago.

00:46:33.160 - 00:46:52.700

I know I've taken some great classes that have really nuanced my perspective on, you know, women's studies, [inaudible] studies. I mean, that's what it's about, you know, is becoming a more complex thinker and

00:46:52.700 - 00:47:09.180

getting exposed to, you know, more points of view. I mean, I grew up in a small conservative town. When I visit it's, you know, it's Trump country now, and it would have been then too, you know, I mean,

00:47:09.180 - 00:47:24.760

I grew up in a very conservative area of the country out in western Pennsylvania, small town. And, you know, it's always been pretty much a Republican stronghold.

00:47:27.320 - 00:47:42.690

Yeah. And I mean, when I first started taking courses, you know, in history, it really broadened my perspective. I mean, there were things they were talking about

00:47:42.690 - 00:48:00.600

that I had never thought about before. I was, you know, I would say that I was probably like most people from that area of the world, very, you know, racially intolerant and not a feminist, you know,

00:48:00.600 - 00:48:25.920

or at least didn't have any critique of, you know, that I could rely on to kind of think about what was happening in terms of gender inequality or racial inequality or, you know, all my education would have led me to believe that the US was the best thing,

00:48:25.920 - 00:48:41.040

you know, since sliced bread. All of those, you know, those attitudes were part of my upbringing, part of my community when I was growing up.

00:48:41.040 - 00:48:59.420

And it, you know, it took quite a lot to, you know, arrive at where I am now or even where I was, you know, by the end of my college years. Mm hmm.

00:49:00.720 - 00:49:15.680

Yeah, I know. I've noticed how a lot of students, you know, you take a, a general introductory women's studies course and then that's how you become incredibly involved in eventually wanting to pursue it.

00:49:16.760 - 00:49:28.090

Yeah. I mean, very few people come into Towson with the idea that they want to be a women's and gender studies major or minor. It's when they take a class in the core

00:49:28.090 - 00:49:44.000

course, you know, we teach a lot of core courses. And it's when they take those classes that they, you know, it sparks their interest and they start thinking about, you know, I'd like to explore this more and in more depth.

00:49:45.360 - 00:49:59.520

Yeah. So in that vein, could you share some advice for young people maybe considering a career in women's studies academia? Yeah.

00:50:00.280 - 00:50:23.800

Well, I think, like, most of our graduates, and we do have a graduate program, and the people who get master's degrees, a lot of them are located, they're working in nonprofits that, you know, are committed to social justice in some way.

00:50:23.800 - 00:50:46.320

So there's opportunities there when the government's not being run by conservative Republicans, there are opportunities in a lot of government agencies that deal with things like women in development or healthcare, you know,

00:50:46.320 - 00:51:06.600

healthcare for marginalized people. We have, you know, graduates of those programs that have done that. Some of our undergraduates have gone right into jobs working in, like,

00:51:06.600 - 00:51:27.260

domestic violence shelters and things like that. Again, sometimes, you know, it just depends what the job requires because sometimes, particularly when you're working with, in government agencies, a lot of times there's some kind of,

00:51:27.260 - 00:51:47.890

you know, health care credentials or things that you need in order to perform those jobs. So, one thing I might recommend is that if you're doing women's and gender studies as a major, it's probably a good idea to do, like, a

00:51:47.890 - 00:52:05.280

double major, right? And have, like, field that maybe has a more direct path towards a career, like something, you know, you major in this, you become that, right?

00:52:05.680 - 00:52:28.140

So things like like nursing, for example, or, you know, something where there's a really more clear career path. And this is true, really, for all liberal arts fields. You know, that there might be, or you might do, like, teacher education or

00:52:28.140 - 00:52:46.150

something. If you think you want to be a teacher and you would like to work at creating more inclusive curriculum in whatever institution you end up teaching in, you know, then, like,

00:52:46.150 - 00:53:09.880

a combination of teacher education preparation and women's and gender studies major or minor would be a great fit. We've had students that do double majors in psych and women's and gender studies because if they're going to become, like, therapists or enter the mental health

00:53:09.880 - 00:53:27.560

field in some way, then, you know, having that knowledge of that intersectional perspective that we offer in our courses can only make them better, you know, better at what they do. Same with the medical field.

00:53:27.760 - 00:53:43.760

Any kind, any job in the medical field, you know, having that kind of perspective is going to make you a better practitioner of whatever you do. I would just encourage people to think, you know, what do I want to do,

00:53:43.760 - 00:54:06.760

like, when I get out, and start thinking about that before you get out so that you can maximize how your education, you know, prepares you for that. Like, have a goal in mind rather than just what I did, which was just kind of wander into it and then think, what am I going to do? Now

00:54:06.760 - 00:54:24.870

I'm a senior, what am I going to do? And basically at that point, you know, I didn't have a lot of options. I basically, I was a history major. I had not prepared to be, like, well, Vassar didn't have a, like, teacher

00:54:24.870 - 00:54:43.880

education preparation, you know, oh, I'll go get a PhD in history, but that's not the optimal way to plan. And of course, at that time there wasn't, you know, you couldn't major in women's and gender studies.

00:54:43.880 - 00:54:58.400

You couldn't even minor in it. So, you know, that wasn't really the question, like, what am I going to do with this major or minor? Because you couldn't get that major or minor most places.

00:55:00.960 - 00:55:09.160

Yeah, right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.

00:55:09.200 - 00:55:30.000

Well, likewise, likewise, we're always glad to have students involved in this process because it's kind of an interview that can be saved that tells people who look at it later as much about the faculty members as it is about the students.

00:55:30.000 - 00:55:43.920

So that's a great, great way to record what's happening. Yeah. And look at, like, generational changes and differences. So, yeah.

00:55:45.680 - 00:55:51.240

Thank you. Thank you. OK. Well, have a great day.

00:55:51.240 - 00:55:55.880

Luck. Good luck. Thank you. Keep us informed.

00:55:56.720 - 00:55:59.960

I'll try my best. OK. Thank you. All right.

00:56:00.000 - 00:56:01.840

Thank you. Bye. Bye.