on our minds
A newsletter of the
Women's Studies Program
Towson State University
Baltimore, MD 21204
Spring 1994 · Vol. VII, No. 1
TOWSON'S WOMEN'S CENTER
CONTINUES TO EVOLVE
by Catherine Francis
Over the summer, Director Leah Schofield and
her two assistants cleaned, repainted, and reorganized
the second oldest Women's Center in the country,
forrned only a year after the University of Iowa's
W omenrs Center. The renovation signals the basic
changes the Women's Center, located in the Towson
Media Center, is undergoing as it prepares for a new
centmy. "We can't afford to be all things to all people
anymore," Schofield says. "We're beginning to focus."
The center is feeling a crunch. With the
budget-induced loss of the assistant director, Meg
Nugent, Schofield's staff has dwindled to two student
assistants, where once the Center had five. Another
change impelled by the budget cuts was the decision to
shift the Women's Center Library to the general Cook
Library collection and eliminate the extensive vertical
files formerly maintained by the Center. A librarian,
Muriel Jones, has been designated liason to the
Women's Center and the Center has kept a number of
the books in order to maintain a large browsing library
for visitors.
Serendipitously, Schofield feels that as
American society has changed, some of the Center's
past duties have become unnecessary. Many of the
services the Center used to provide, such as self-defense
training for women or programs to educate students
about date rape, have been picked up by other
organizations on campus or society at large. Her
contacts with other women's centers directors
demonstrates that this is the case across the country.
Schofield anticipates being able to take programming in
new directions, thinking in terms of target groups, rather
than the public at large.
For example, this year the Center, after
discovering that women often have low confidence and
self-esteem when entering the workplace, has
collaborated with female faculty in the Business School
to design a series of workshops and seminars to alleviate
the problem. In the spring, the Center hopes to hook up
with professional women's organizations to help female
students make connections with possible mentors.
Other projects revolve around developing student
leadership and the creation of a victim witness program.
Continued Page 8
WOMEN'S STUDIES INTERNATIONAL
by K Edgington
In June, four Towson faculty members, two
administrators, and one graduate of TSU's Women's
Studies program delivered papers at an international
Women's Studies Conference held at Carl von Ossietz.ky
Universitat, Oldenburg, Germany. Other speakers
included scholars from the Netherlands, Poland, Russia,
Austria, and Germany.
Although Vrouwenstudies began in the
Netherlands in the early seventies, only a few
universities in Germany offer Frauenstudien; these fields
are more general than Women's Studies in the U. S. and
include "women's issues" as well as feminist ones. Even
in western Europe Women's Studies is less fully
institutionalized than in the States, and in eastern
Europe, development is just beginning. Consequently,
the European scholars were quite interested in learning
about the progress of Women's Studies in America and
specifically in hearing of our experiences at Towson.
Continued Page 5
