on our minds
Women's Studies Program
Towson State University
Baltimore, MD 21204
Spring 1989 Vol. III No. l
Towson NWSA
Conference
by Sara Coulter and
Margaret Blanchard
The Women's Studies program at Towson State University is
pleased to welcome the feminist community for the NWSA 1989
National Conference, June 14-18. The theme of the conference,
"Feminist Transformations," is intended to emphasize the changes
in the classroom, in the community, and in ourselves that foster
women's growth and autonomy. After twenty or more years of
feminist activism, it is time to take stock of how far we have come
and where we want to go, both in the short and long term - the
transformations we have achieved and those yet to be accomplished.
The three conference plenaries will focus on feminist scholarship,
women students, and curriculum transformation, reflecting the location
of women's studies in the academic world, but recognizing that
it is the tie with the community, the diversity of women and of
women's concerns, that is the unique strength of NWSA.
Towson has a long history of commitment to women. Originally
a state teacher's college, then a liberal arts college, and now a
comprehensive university, it has one of the oldest women's studies
programs in the nation and a women's center and day care facilities
that are the oldest such facilities in continuous operation in a
university. In Everywoman's Guide to Schools and Colleges (Feminist
Press, 1982) Towson was ranked among the top three coeducational
public universities in providing quality programs for women.
More recently, it has gained national recognition for two major
FIPSE funded curriculum transformation projects. The first project
(1983-86) provided five semesters of workshops for over seventy
Towson faculty in thirteen disciplines. Faculty reviewed the new
scholarship on women in order to revise their courses, especially the
introductory level surveys, to include more material by and about
women and to use gender as a category of analysis. The second
project, which began in Fall 1988, is extending this work to five
community colleges in the Baltimore-Washington area. Forty-five
community college faculty have received released time from their
institutions to participate in this project for three semesters.
In response to expanding interest in this work, Towson is creating
a women's institute which will emphasize undergraduate curriculum
transformation. At the NWSA conference, it will sponsor a one-day,
Pre-Conference Meeting on Curriculum Transformation, on Wednesday,
June 14, to provide a forum for information, materials,
discussion, and analysis of current curriculum transformation work.
Faculty and students actively involved in such work, and those
interested in learning about it, are encouraged to plan their arrival at
the conference early enough to attend this meeting, which will run
from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Baltimore is an appropriate site for the NWSA conference. For
the past twenty years, it has been an active center of the women's
movement. Beginning with consciousness-raising sessions that grew
out of a very strong anti-war movement, Baltimore feminists became
active in many endeavors. In 1969, a group of Baltimore women
started publishing Women: A Journal of Liberation, the first national
feminist publication of this generation of the women's movement.
This magazine, which had an international circulation, was published
for thirteen years. In 1970, The Feminist Press was founded in
Baltimore. In 1971, women who had been active at the People's
Free Medical Clinic formed The Women's Growth Center, a feminist
counseling and education center, which helped pioneer feminist
therapy techniques as well as provide women with low cost counseling.
In 1972, growing out of the Journal collective, the Women's
Union was one of a number of groups nationwide to formulate a
socialist-feminist perspective. In the early l970's, the Baltimore
Women's Center was a hub of feminist activity. By the mid-70's
Baltimore Working Women organized clerical workers, and the
Thirty-First Street Bookstore, a feminist community center, was a
successful business that has recently become a women-owned cooperative.
Feminists from the early women's movement are still active,
and now powerful, in areas like housing, education, employment,
health care, mental health, spirituality, peace, environmental concerns,
politics, legislation, and the arts. In recognition of this long
history, a number of sessions at the NWSA conference will feature
Baltimore feminists in workshop presentations and cultural events.
Performance Anxiety
Among Academics
by Clarinda Lott
During the spring of 1987, just back from a professional conference
in Atlanta, I wrote a newspaper column about the privately expressed
terrors shared by many of the women at the conference in
relation to the talks they were about to give. In the midst of the
column, I wondered whether male presenters felt different. Do all
academicians feel intensely anxious about making presentations to
their peers? Does everyone worry about projecting the wrong image
or letting the team down? Or do women feel this way more
markedly than men? After the column was printed, I realized that
this vague "wondering" was something I could actually investigate.
What I had to do to get my questions answered was to ask.
"I composed a questionnaire consisting of thirty sentences which
were to receive a response of "always," "often," "sometimes,"
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