The College of St. ScholasticaVOL. I 2006

Women and Advertising 1

Four Women, Four Voices 9

Ada Igoe

The Scriptorium 17

Sylvia Lorena Rodriguez

Elisabeth Connolly

Feminism and the Body: Deconstructing the Myth of Women as "Tradition" in the Colonial State 25

C. Neal Keye, Ph.D

Practitioner Interview: Beth Olson, PAVSA 35

Table of Contents

Trends in marketing towards the female demographic have shifted throughout the course of the past half-century to objectify women in product development and promotion

Four women are interviewed about their upbringing, politics, and spiritual life to elicit discussion around causes for activation of feminist awakening

Tracing trends in the College's original student-run newspaper provides insight into women's societal roles during and after World War II

The practices of sati in British India and clitoridectomy throughout Africa continue to oppress women through the reinforcement of patriarchial structures

The movement against sexual abuse requires dependable funding streams and a sustained feminist analysis in order to effectively combat the rape culture

AcknowledgementsEditor-in-Chief:

Diane Tran

Assistant Editor: Rebecca Patronas

Student Editorial Review Board:Angela JohnsonGeorge PatronasWendy SchneiderAmanda Sneed

Bryan Yunis

Design and Layout Editor:Bryan Yunis

Faculty Advisor: C. Neal Keye, Ph.D

Faculty and Staff Editorial Review Board:Lynn HamreLezlie Oachs

Suzanne Yunis, Ph.D

Guest Contributors:Elisabeth Connelly

Ada IgoeC. Neal Keye, Ph.D

Beth OlsonSylvia Lorena Rodriguez

Dear Readers: We are proud to present the 2006 first edition of the annual Feminist Forum. Founded in 2005, Feminist Forum is the College of St. Scholastica’s first academic student publication. Feminist Forum recognizes that women founded the College of St. Scholastica and that their ways of thinking and feminist critique helped shape the institution. We hope to continue that tradition and explore contemporary feminist issues and critique through the Feminist Forum. Our mission is to provide an academic complement to the practical accomplishments in women’s issues on campus. The scholarly work the Feminist Forum (FF) presents in the pages that follow share common acknowledgement of varying and far-reaching implications for women due to the shifting of normative societal roles as a result of World War II. In this regard, one paper explores the field of advertising and its relationship to the female market, specifically studying the effects of the post-war return of males to the U.S. FF also engages local women regarding their personal histories in order to analyze epiphantic events or what Jane O’Reilly would consider “Click” moments. The Forum further explores St. Scholastica’s institutional history with a paper that traces the trends in growth of the College’s first student-run newspaper. The FF is pleased to welcome a faculty contribution, a contemporary look at colonial practices of sati in British India and clitoridectomy throughout Africa which highlights the wide range of issues for which a feminist perspective and methodology are still critical and pertinent for women worldwide. Finally, we are pleased to feature the insights of local PAVSA (Program to Aid Victims of Sexual Assault) Program Coordinator, Beth Olson, who discusses current national trends in funding for sexual abuse in an FF interview. FF acknowledges and applauds this year’s contributing writers and supporters from the local and campus community. The quality and depth of the submitted contributions, along with the commitment on the part of the accepted authors throughout the editing process, made the process rewarding. We would especially like to recognize our faculty advisor, Professor C. Neal Keye, who offered considerable guidance and inspiration for the creation of the journal. We are extremely privileged to have worked together with members of both the Student and the Faculty and Staff Editorial Review Boards in a collaborative editing process. Finally, we would also like to thank the St. Scholastica Student Senate and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Beth Domholdt, for their support and sponsorship of the journal. Feminist Forum is a mechanism for students, faculty, and staff to envision a society that advocates feminist institutions and further increases exploration in the field of Women’s Studies. The opportunity to publish research and original work, particularly for undergraduate students, takes mere academic coursework out of the classroom context and allows for schoolwork to meaningfully contribute to larger society. We encourage students, faculty, and staff to submit their papers related to women’s issues and the feminist critique for next year’s publication to carry on the high academic quality of the journal.

Sincerely,

Diane Tran Editor-in-Chief

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Women and Advertising: An Historical Look at the Interactions Between Women and Advertisers Ada Igoe

“As cultural artifacts,” writes Katherine Toland Frith, “advertisements shape human consciousness and

reflect the values and mores of a society” (Valdiva 195). Since the first advertisement was printed in 1478 by William Caxton (Biagi 194), advertisements have slowly grown to both shape and mirror the world they exist in, sometimes using shocking methods to bring attention to the products they promote. Throughout history, advertisements aimed at women have often questioned women’s intellect and integrity, making them appear more as objects than actual human beings. As advertisers strive to convince women of the true necessity of a product, women seem to be presented with images of their inadequacy. But what influence do advertisements really hold over women’s sense of self and how long have advertisers been manipulating women? This paper will seek to answer these questions, as well as investigate whether the treatment of women at the hands of advertisers is in any way improving.

American women first became an audience targeted by advertisers in the 1880's. Magazines, especially female-oriented publications like Ladies’ Home Journal, were gaining popularity, and magazine moguls like Cyrus H.K. Curtis suggested that advertising might be an excellent way to draw in revenue the magazines needed to survive. With a decidedly female demographic to capitalize on, advertisers began to spin their messages to appeal to women. With the Industrial Revolution underway, transportation was improving, new products were being invented and companies were anxious to promote their new products to as large a market as possible. “A number of the earliest mass-produced items, such as cereals, canned goods and cleaning powders, were assumed to be of interest to women because of their domestic role, and therefore a significant proportion of early advertising was targeted specifically at women,” wrote Helen Damon-Moore in her history of women and advertising. “As markets became national, gender-related assumptions provided a language through which advertisers could reach a specific yet sizable audience” (para 2).

Further pigeonholing women in terms of advertising were the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, the American social scientist whose “Theory of the Leisure Class” introduced to Americans the term “conspicuous consumption,” the idea that people consume as a way to display their superior status to everyone around them. “The most obvious form in which this consumption occurs is seen in the wearing of liveries and the occupation of spacious servants’ quarters,” Veblen wrote in 1902. “Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious consumption and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling and furniture by the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment” (para. 1). Basically, Veblen felt that the job of consuming of items that were actually useful to daily living should fall on the shoulders of the women of a household, an idea advertisers latched onto and, to this day, have difficulty letting go of, as toilet bowl cleansers are rarely pitched to men.

Veblen, however, was to a certain extent merely reflecting the attitudes of the country he was writing about. With such a successful Industrial Revolution occurring roughly half a century before Veblen wrote his theory at the turn of the twentieth century, American factories seemed to be mass-producing everything, creating a bit of a problem. “Someone had to buy all the stuff the country’s factories were producing,” explained Susan J. Douglas (18). “And much of what was getting produced wasn’t necessities, it was

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conveniences and little luxuries. So advertisers had to start convincing people to reverse their value systems completely; to spend, to be self-indulgent, to gratify themselves immediately, and to feel entitled to plenty of leisure time [sic].”

While it was household products that were first pitched to women, by the 1920's beauty products and other luxury items were beginning to be advertised. “Women from this point on were often objectified in and targeted by advertising The changing portrayal of women in beauty advertising paralleled the evolution in the image of women as consumers, moving from the position that women can be beautiful to the message that women must be beautiful” (Damon-Moore para. 4).

Since the 1920's, women have been called on over and over again to analyze themselves through the images in advertisements. The message of advertisements has often been that women must appear a certain way if we are to be truly happy. Women must somehow fit themselves into stereotypes such as beautiful or domestic. This assumption suffered somewhat during the 1930's and 40's with the Depression and Second World War, when advertisers called upon women to be strong and fill the absence of the men. Characters like Rosie the Riveter portrayed women in strong roles that broke stereotypes.

However, the end of the war signaled Rosie’s departure from advertising. By the 1950's, the men had come home and most women had returned to their domestic spheres. “Some women did remain in the work force, but they disappeared from public view and were replaced almost completely in advertising and the commercial media by images of women as happy homemakers and sexy seductresses,” writes Damon-Moore (para. 9). Suddenly women were depicted wearing heels and pearls as they scrubbed floors with huge smiles on their faces.

Despite widespread protests during the 1960's and 70's from feminist groups outraged by the portrayal of women in the media, the image of the woman as beautiful, alluring, and often maternal, that has dominated America since the 1950's has undergone only mild revisions. “Historians will argue, and rightly so, that American women have been surrounded by contradictory expectations since at least the nineteenth century. To appeal to the lowest common denominator, TV and advertisers offered homogenized, romanticized images of America” (Douglas 15).

But the lowest common denominator when it comes to women’s portrayal in advertising is often downright offensive to actual women. The methods of advertising to women have been criticized by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. In the early 1970's, former writer and model Jean Kilbourne joined the crusade against demoralizing advertising directed toward women. Rather than seeing an improvement in how women are portrayed in advertisements over the past 30 years, Kilbourne has felt ads targeting women are actually becoming worse.

“The mass media are not simple mirrors, reflecting ‘reality’ to us. The news, sitcoms, or ads are not reflections of the worlds; they are careful, deliberate construction. To borrow Todd Gitler’s metaphor, they are more like fun-house mirrors that distort and warp ‘reality’ by exaggerating and magnifying some features of American life and values while collapsing, ignoring, and demonizing others” (Douglas 16). That media have the capability of, to a certain extent, censoring what Americans are exposed to is one of the scariest things about advertisements and the media in general. By showing only certain characteristics – both physical and non – in advertisements, the risk is that everyone, especially women, will assume that the media portray an unachievable ideal.

Since the 1950's, advertisements, as well as the media, have pandered to women as though females are not humans, but physical specimens who can be put on display and analyzed from every angle, almost like a caged animal (Douglas 17). “[It] reminds us that women in patriarchal cultures are, in fact, meat,” writes Frith (Valdiva 194). “In one ad from Hebrew National, a slim woman in a bathing suit is featured with the headline: ‘There’s more fat on her than on our salami.’” Not only are women displayed and scrutinized, their very essence is defined through advertisements. “Women are supposed to be dependent, passive, nurturing types, uninterested in competition, achievement or success, who should conform to the wishes of the men in their lives” (Douglas 17).

With so many ideas about femininity being broadcast through advertisements, it seems inevitable that a woman’s sense of self would be affected, if only by the sheer ubiquity of advertisements in America.

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According to Jean Kilbourne, an average American sees anywhere from 400 to 3000 advertisements every day. “Because of the prevalence of advertising in our culture, the sheer amount of cultural shape it occupies, it is crucial to examine and understand the stories advertising tells us about femininity and what it means to be a woman,” says Kilbourne in her 2000 film, Killing Us Softly 3.

So what are advertisements telling us about women? In her book, Putting on Appearances, Diane Barthel argues that advertisements give women set ideas of how to approach issues of status, relationships, and body image. “Advertisements often do not explicitly urge the consumer to buy a given product; rather they promise that the products will enhance a person’s life, many times with simple images” (Winslow, para. 2). The mission of an advertisement is to convince people of an unfulfilled need that previously could not be met, but now can be with the advertised product. However, advertisements may be doing more than just persuading women to buy their product. They may also be teaching women to see themselves in ways that are detrimental to both their mental and physical well-being.

According to Max Sutherland’s Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer, advertisers are not necessarily trying to be derogatory, but to sell their products. “Advertising has to be attention. It has to ‘cut through’ the clutter of other advertising and get noticed” (100). Humanities and human sciences professor, Jib Fowles, cites 15 appeals he sees as being the main ways advertisers gain that attention of the consumers: needs for sex, affiliation, guidance, attention, autonomy and aesthetic sensation; needs to nurture, aggress, achieve, dominate, prominence, escape, feel safe, and satisfy curiosity; and physiological needs (Biagi 198). While Fowles feels only 2 percent of advertisements on television use sex as an appeal, many media critics feel differently. The need for sex and aesthetic sensation are often the most used in ads directed toward women (“Body Image” para. 1).

“Pick up a young woman’s magazine and you’ll find it filled with information about spending a lot of money, dieting and how to seduce a man,” says Mary Pipher. “We really bombard young women with not only useless information, but worse than useless information” (qtd. in Ganton). Critics worry that advertisements which consistently use thin women in sexual or compromised positions are affecting the way women view themselves. According to Mediascope, the typical model weighs, on average, 23 percent less than a typical woman. In a 1984 poll from Glamour, 75 percent of women viewed themselves as “too fat.” Although the poll is 21 years old, critics such as Kilbourne believe feelings of shame and embarrassment are still prevalent among females when thinking about their bodies. As thin bodies are continually marketed as the ideal beauty, critics fear that advertisements contributing to this mindset could be influencing the anorexia and bulmia epidemic that has been sweeping the nation since the late 1960's.

A big part of what leads women to feel inadequate about their bodies is that they are marketed to not as people, but as objects. “Our face becomes a mask,” says Kilbourne, “and our body becomes a thing” (Simon para. 3). Intentional or not, many advertisements come off as sexist as they urge women to become better by being beautiful or appealing through use of certain products. Kilbourne points out that women are often shown with eyes blackened with makeup or in promiscuous positions, sending mixed messages to both men and women about females’ roles in society. “Turning a human being into a thing is often the first step toward justifying violence,” Kilbourne says. Although a backpack advertisement stating “Who says guys are afraid of commitment? He’s had the same backpack for years” and then promises “not to rip, tear, break, or ask for a ring,” can be viewed as humorous, it is the collective message of many such ads that we need to be worried about. If we are to summarize the message of the nation’s advertisers, being beautiful and getting a man is all most females care about.

In a study conducted by Lavine, Sweeney and Wagner, it was suggested that “depression and loss of self-esteem may be indirectly facilitated by exposure to sexist TV ads (or activation of the female sex object subtype) through its direct influence on body dissatisfaction” (1056). Even ads that deal with the “supermom” tend to show the female only on a domestic level. Barthel believes women who already view themselves as “tough, smart, and driven would not be easily swayed by such appeals” that focus on the women being capable of juggling the multiple facets of life (137).

Instead, the females we must worry about are those who question themselves and how advertisers will market to them. Over and over again, advertisements strive to point out flaws so women feel a need for their

Women and Advertising product. “Women are primarily physical specimens to be surveyed intently by the camera,” writes Douglas. “Print ads in particular reinforce this, with their endless images of pouty-lipped beautiful women looking at themselves in the mirror, being gazed at adoringly by men and by other women consumed with envy” (17). Thanks to digital editing of images, women now appear flawless with airbrushed faces. “Ideal” features are mixed and matched from various women to create a “perfect” woman. The appearance of models seen in magazines and other advertisements influenced 69 percent of girls surveyed, even though the “ideal” beauty they see is literally unattainable (‘Body Image’ para. 3). Even women’s bodies portrayed in athletic advertisements seem to be enhanced, especially in light that female breasts become smaller through exercise, not larger. “The concern people used to place over the state of their souls, they now focus on the condition of their bodies,” writes Barthel (164).

Beauty isn’t the only thing women are influenced by when viewing advertisements. According to Diane Barthel, advertisements also tell women where they stand in society. While advertising must create new needs and desires if it is to be successful, consuming has become a way for women to reach a certain status in the world around them. “She becomes a luxury object herself as through her shopping, fashion display and evident leisure she performs what Thorstein Veblen called ‘vicarious consumption,’” (87). By consuming certain goods and carrying around bags from the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus, the female sends out specific messages to those around her about her taste, status and wealth. But such displays can come at an expense. When a middle-class woman tries to move up in a social class through her status purchases, she often ends up buying things she can’t afford. Prestigious brands, especially makeups, are less likely to display the price tag until after the purchase is committed. The assertion of advertisements that females must consume in order to be who they truly want to be can have a detrimental effect on both women’s psyches and their checkbooks.

“It is no wonder that advertising stressed the appearance of youth and the values of youth,” comments Barthel. “It is caught up with youth’s crises and concerns; namely finding identity and managing intimacy [sic]” (187). Another large concern with advertising is that the attention is focused mainly on the young and the beautiful. Although the need for authority is one of the persuasive appeals Jib Fowles stated in advertising, older women, especially in the 1980's, were laughed at in ads as their pretty, young daughters triumphed over “what Mom always said.” The American Association of Retired People has recently launched a campaign to battle the age stereotypes advertisements often contain. “To most marketers, consumers die the minute they turn 50,” read the campaign’s advertisements. According Rick Adler, “If a company markets a product to the 50+ market and that product does nothing but maintain its market share, it should increase sales by 35 to 50 percent over the next 20 years.” AARP is using such facts in their campaign to promote equal treatment in the advertisement world. Still, companies such as Oil of Olay continually market age-defying makeup and creams as a way for women to maintain their youthful appearance. Age spots and wrinkles are no longer treated as signs of living and experience in a person, but as unsightly indicators of age.

As much as advertisers are accused of deteriorating the confidence of women, females aren’t the only ones suffering at the hands of advertisers. In the same study by Lavine, Sweeney, and Wagner that found sexist TV advertisements promoted a sense of depression and inadequacy among women, it was found that men also suffer from insecurities that are presented to them through advertising. According to the study, men are often faced with the message to appear more muscular. While males make up only about 10 percent of those suffering from eating disorders, that number has been growing in recent years (Body Image para 18). “My sense of self-esteem too often depends on how I see my body, and my body image is increasingly affected by a continuous, arbitrary onslaught of images and messages that dictate the rights and wrongs of physical appearance,” writes Chris Godsey, commenting on how men’s attitudes toward their bodies have been evolving recently.

With advertisers’ projected images of advertisers often considered “standard” to Americans, one has to wonder if there will ever be gains in the portrayal of humans in advertisements. “I often joke that I’ve been doing this work for 30 years and everything’s gotten worse,” said Kilbourne in an interview with Cathy Resmer. While women have been increasing their economic opportunities around the world, they seem to be becoming increasingly aware of appearance as a way to maintain some sort of confused identity. “Nothing

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Feminist Forum from the feminist movement turned out the way it was supposed to,” said Maureen Dowd in an interview about her new book Are Men Necessary? “We went from women not shaving their legs to women getting laser treatments, and now looks are more essential than ever. Women are reshaping the world, but now it’s hard to find one who wants to talk about anything other than skin and guys” (Glamour 58).

However, as advertisements continue to feature sex and beautiful people, some companies have been striving to include realistic females in their advertisements. In the past year, both Nike and Dove introduced ad campaigns featuring women who didn’t fit into the average size 6 worn by most models. “It is our belief that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes and ages,” the marketing director of Dove, Phillippe Harousseau, said. “Our mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by broadening the definition of beauty.”

As much as women across the nation have applauded the efforts of Nike and Dove, some have been less than accepting of these new campaigns. “Really, the only time I want to see a thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it . . . ads should be about beautiful people,” wrote Lucio Guerrero, a columnist in the Chicago Sun-Times (Halpin 78). Others fear that Dove’s ads are too contradictory to be taken seriously. While Dove’s campaign for real bodies embraces women of larger sizes, the company at the same time is advertising for three products that will reduce the appearance of cellulite. Dove officials have brushed aside such criticism. “We are telling them to take care of themselves, take care of their beauty,” Deb Boyda, a representative of Dove said. “That’s very different from sending them the message to look like something they’re not (Schrobsdoff para 10).”

Critics are hopeful that efforts such as these may bring a shift in how females view themselves. Both Glamour and Seventeen have made a commitment within the past few years to feature plus-sized women among the pages of their magazines. Officials in European countries, such as France, have also been working to reduce the number of pornographic advertisements. In addition, multiple organizations such as Adbusters and About-Face have been formed to bring the public’s attention to advertisements that are offensive to females.

Advertisements are not completely at fault for the issues of identity among American women. As Stephen Fox has said, “It is too obvious, too easy, a matter of killing the messenger instead of dealing with the bad news. The people who have created modern advertising are not hidden persuaders pushing the buttons in the service of some malevolent people” (qtd. in Barthel 186). Instead, advertisements reflect what is visible in the society that surrounds those who create the advertisements. Unless there is a decided cultural shift against the twisted and offensive ads for women, the advertisements will continue to be made. “Changes in advertising will depend on an aware, active, educated public that thinks of itself primarily as citizens rather than as consumers,” said Kilbourne. Though we are currently caught in a tangle of consumerism, simply demanding that advertisers change their portrayal of women may be the difference between women being treated like meat or actual thinking individuals. After all, society is self-directed and changing the attitudes of advertisers requires speaking out against offensive messages conveyed through today’s advertisements.

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Works Cited American Association of Retired People. Research. 10 Dec. 2005. <http://www.aarpmedia.org> Associated Press. “More curves hit pages of women’s magazines.” MSNBC.com. 9 Aug. 2005.

<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8886240/> Associated Press. “Dove Ads with ‘real’ women get attention.” MSNBC.com. 3 Aug. 2005.

<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8885430/> Barthel, Diane. Putting on Apperances. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988. Biagi, Shirley. Media Impact: an introduction to Mass Media. 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson, Wadsworth,

2003 Damon-Moore, Helen. “Advertising.” Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History.

<http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/html/wm_ooosoo_advertising.htm Dittrich, Liz. “About Face Facts on Body Image.” About-Face.com.

<http://about-face.org/resources/facts/bodyimage/html> 14 April 2000. Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with Mass Media. New York, NY:

Times Books, 1994. Dowd, Maureen. “Are women going backward?” Glamour. Dec. 2005: 58. Garton, Nicole. “Reviving Ophelia . . . again.” Tennessean.com. 17 Oct. 2005. Godsey, Chris. “How Does It Feel?” Adios Barbie. 10 Dec. 2005.

<http://www.adiosbarbies.com/features/features_godsey.html> Halpin, Mikki. “Best and Worst Star Trends of ‘05.” Glamour. Dec. 2005: 77-80. “Issue Briefs.” Body Image and Advertising. Studio City, CA.: Mediascope Press. Killing Us Softly 3. Jean Kilbourne. Videocassette. MediaEd. 2000. Lavine, Howard, Donna Sweeney, and Stephen Wagner. “Depicting Women as Sex Objects in Television

Advertising: Effects on Body Dissatisfaction.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 5 June 1998: 1049-1058.

Resmer, Cathy. “Immune to Marketing?” Adbuster. 5 April 2005.

<http://www.sevendaysvt.com/features/2005/adbuster/> Schrobsdoff, Susanna. “Summer of Dove.” Newsweek. 5 Aug. 2005.

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<http://msnbc.msn.com/id/88121278> Sutherland, Max. Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2000. Valdiva, Angharad N., ed. Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media. Thousand Oak, CA: Sag

Publications, 1995. Veblen, Thorstein. “Conspicuous Consumption.” Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of

Institutions. New York: Macmillian, 1902: 68-101. Winslow, Lance. “Advertising Education or Condemnation, Stream of Thought.” Business Ezines.

<http://ezinearticle.com>

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Four Women, Four Voices Sylvia Lorena Rodriguez

My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world. Faye Wattleton

Diverse women’s social backgrounds, family relationships, educational achievements, personal

experiences, and religious preferences have shaped their perception of and participation in the women’s rights movement, their understanding of gender roles, and their involvement in politics. Sister Donna Schroeder, Sister Katherine McLaughlin, Teresa Mary Gould, and Lynne Hamre are four different women with four different voices. Despite their differences, these women hold in common their observation of women’s submission to the hegemony of a patriarchal society throughout history. One of the four women interviewed was born in the 1960’s and the other three were born in the 1930’s. Collectively, they have lived through the consequences of the Great Depression, World War II, the Communist hysteria of the 1980’s, and the controversies behind the women’s rights movement. Historical setting

During the 1930’s, the United States was recovering from the devastating economic crisis of 1929. High unemployment rates left many families in poverty. The difficulty for women in trying to find a job increased and their struggle faced new challenges. Ann Marie Low offers an example of the hardships many women endured during the Great Depression. It was impossible for her to find a job in spite of being single and having a college education. Instead of teaching, she found herself gathering weeds and helping the family care for the cattle. Her ambitions became foreign to her own personal fulfillment. Her only concern was that her siblings were able to go to college. She even had to reject the idea of marriage in order to keep working to help her siblings save money (Low). This decade came to a close with the start of the war, which put an end to the Great Depression through the creation of millions of new jobs.

This was an opportunity for women to enter what was traditionally considered men’s territory, and at the same time, protect and serve their country. With the increase of women’s participation in the workforce, feminists strengthened emphasis on gender equality. Their participation went from the limited fields available to women during the 1930’s to a multitude of opportunities in the war industry, government service, and the armed forces. Their participation was encouraged by government propaganda and was so successful that stay at home mothers were even considered unpatriotic. In spite of all the improvements, the debate over women’s roles and rights did not end. Characteristics usually attributed to women, according to their sex, like modesty and nurture, remained; the recognition of their rights and equal treatment in the workforce was questionable (Norton and Alexander).

A decade later, the same government propaganda machine that had encouraged women’s participation in the workforce shifted its focus completely. There was no longer a patriotic call to serve the country in the workforce, but instead, at home. This time, the focus was on domesticity as a feminine ideal, which promoted marriage and motherhood as ‘natural’ to women, and work outside the home as an impediment to women in fulfilling such natural goals in life. Thus, the 1940’s and 1950’s witnessed the birth of baby-boomers and the rise of larger families that challenged those privileges that women had achieved in the workforce during the war. As the struggle continued, in an attempt to fight against feminists who denounced discrimination, demanded equality and rejected gender roles, antifeminists called them neurotic and unfeminine (Lundberg and Farnham).

Four Women, Four Voices Feminism and a growing women’s awareness of the injustices that surrounded them alerted the

public about the urgent need for a social change. A woman’s right to choose became the main subject of debates over sexual education, birth control, and abortion. Much controversy arose from these issues, mainly from male politicians, religious conservatives and parents. Faye Wattleton, a feminist activist, had the opportunity to witness the suffering of women and children during her years working in maternal and infant care. Throughout those years, she became aware of the misery and cruelty under which some children lived. In particular cases, she saw the need for pregnant women, who saw their unwanted children as burdens, to have the option of whether they would have them or not. Sexual education, she concluded, was extremely necessary for teenagers at home as well as outside the home to avoid unnecessary pain. In addition, birth control methods had to be available for women who decided to engage in sexual activity, and abortion had to be a woman’s choice. When it came to sexual education, parents feared that this was a way to encourage their children to be sexually active. On issues of birth control, Faye Wattleton, serving as President of Planned Parenthood, received harsh criticism from angry parents and religious groups, among others, that perceived Planned Parenthood as a threat to their authority or morals. The struggle to make abortion legal and affordable created particular controversy, causing the enmity of many. At the same time it raised the consciousness of others who cared for the otherwise impressive high death tolls. Wattleton’s understanding of the tragedies that resulted from unwanted pregnancies strengthened her determination to make birth control and abortions more accessible to women. Illegal and expensive abortions caused women from all conditions of society unnecessary trouble and pain. Some suffered first hand experiences like going through the embarrassment of asking their family for help or for their consent, humiliation during their search for money, and hopelessness for not being able to afford an abortion. While some lived to tell their stories, others bled their lives away in unknown beds and in unknown places. The key solution to this dilemma was the acceptance of reproductive rights. “Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can't take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can't take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right” (Wattleton).

The fight for the recognition of reproductive freedom as a human right was accompanied by the acknowledgement of another social injustice. There were women who, like Wattleton, were capable of recognizing a pattern that pointed to poverty as a major factor behind these catastrophes. Poor financial situations and the lack of access to birth control methods to prevent unwanted pregnancies often led these women to experience economic strangulation of their own families and the whole community as well. The story of Jimmy, a boy who lived a short miserable life, is the story of an unwanted pregnancy. Had there been easy access to birth control methods, or even to abortion, Jimmy would not have been forced to go through a tragic death when he was just four months of age. Sadly, born in poverty, his family could not afford offering Jimmy a warm home, thus, Jimmy died of pneumonia in a cold winter. Neither would it have cost the family or the community money they could not afford. Jimmy’s birth and death placed his family and the whole community, already struggling with poverty, in an uncomfortable and unnecessary position (Norton and Alexander). Poverty has clearly been a factor present in the debate over family planning, as it has affected women and entire families with overwhelming consequences.

In order to hear first hand from women whose lives have been affected by some or all of these issues, four students from The College of St. Scholastica conducted interviews with four women from Minnesota. These women have been exposed in different situations to the various outcomes of the patriarchal society in which they grew up. They shared with their interviewees their opinions on social, economic and political concerns, especially those that feminists in the United States, in the past and today, have been struggling with. The way they lived these historical experiences varies as much as their opinions regarding them. Personal Experiences

Four different women talked about their educational and family experiences over their years growing up. Sister Donna Schroeder was born in the 1930’s into a poor and hard-working family, in which the presence of the father was very strong. Her father could not finish high school because he had to

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work, and her mother had to postpone it until later in life, when her youngest children were at school. The Schroeders suffered the loss of a child when Sister Donna was very young. Her sister tragically died at the age of eleven, when she drowned. Sister Donna attended a Catholic high school and entered the religious community in her junior year in college, which is where she earned a degree in Biology and also obtained a minor in Math (Schroeder). Teresa Marie Gould and Sister Katherine McLaughlin were also born in the 1930’s. Similarly, both Teresa’s and Sister Katherine’s parents finished high school, and acquired some college education. Teresa came from a poor family and was the youngest sister of three siblings. Like Sister Donna, Teresa also experienced death in her family at a young age. Teresa’s mother died when she was sixteen years of age. Because she had to look after her mother during her illness, as the family was not able to afford a nurse, she had a tough time studying and barely made it to graduation (Gould). In the case of Sister Katherine, poverty was not an issue. She came from a middle class family, with parents that were almost like grandparents because they decided to have children late in their lives. She said that her relationship with her parents and siblings was not great, but all right, and that she always felt loved. She remembered her mother as being “tough as nails” and her father as “the gentler of the two” (McLaughlin). The fourth woman, Lynne Hamre, was born in 1962. Her parents got their education through high school. She said she had a good relationship with her parents, who were divorced. She recalled how rarely she saw her father, who was not around very often even when she was growing up (Hamre). With the exception of Teresa Marie Gould, these women exceeded their parent’s educational level by obtaining their master’s degrees, and, in the case of Sister Katherine McLaughlin and Sister Donna Schroeder, their PhDs. These four women came from families of relatively similar sizes; some of them shared similar social backgrounds and obtained a similar level of education. Their religious, career, and political choices, however, were diverse.

Three of these women received a religious call and the reasons for their involvement in the church varied greatly. Sister Donna’s mother was Lutheran and her father was Catholic. It was not until one of their children passed away that the family decided to attend church regularly. When Sister Donna’s father made that decision, her involvement in the church went from practicing occasionally to almost daily attendance. She mentioned that religion was important to her. Her fondness for religion strengthened after she finished her high school years in a Catholic boarding school. Later, during her junior year in college, she entered the religious community, where she learned “how to be a good nun.” She grew into a love of her religion and vocation. In this matter, Sister Katherine’s religious call differed tremendously. She described a mystical experience, at the age of three or four, when, one night, while she was lying in bed, she felt all her senses awaken. She experienced “being part of something very large and mysterious, just being caught up in something that was way beside myself, that was much bigger than I was.” This and other experiences like it, she said, made up her religious call, to which she attended to for the rest of her life. She said she had to admit that, perhaps subconsciously, it was a combination of factors that led her to attend to her mystical experience. Even though the religious motivation was the main factor, the narrow options for women who wanted to continue their education or pursue a professional career played a part in her decision. Their choices were to enter the religious community, become a nurse, or get her degree in Home Economics, also called a “Mrs. degree.”

Teresa Marie Gould received a religious call, as well. However, she did not attend to it in the same way. She only attended two years of what she called “college nun school” because she felt very homesick, which made it impossible for her to stay any longer. Her mother had died, and she felt the need to take care of the family. She mentioned that the Sisters in college had noticed how much she missed home and “ordered” her to find a husband and settle down. Because she could not continue her college studies, the option was to find a husband and have children. Perhaps unconsciously, women were surrendering to a society that obstructed their freedom to choose whatever they wanted to make of their lives. In the case of Sister Katherine, she was clearly interested in a professional and educated life, and Teresa’s failure to enter the religious community resulted in the only alternative available, the pursuit of a home-dedicated life. Their submission to society’s impositions were clear in other fields as well, especially when it came to the workforce.

Four Women, Four Voices In regard to their opinion about women in the workforce, even though Teresa, Lynne, Sister

Donna and Sister Katherine had different things to say, they all recognized gender differences and in some cases defined women’s roles. Teresa, a woman who had settled into a family life and abided by the impositions of society, thought that women were unsuitable for jobs in the battlefield, in the fire department or in the ditches. According to her, these were men’s jobs. Contradictorily, she held the opinion that women had the right to take part in the workforce. Of course, she limited their job options as nurses, secretaries, or dispatchers, never in conjunction with men. To some extent, Lynne and Sister Donna also abided by society’s determination of women’s place in the workforce according to gender roles. On the one hand, Lynne claimed that she never felt different from males because she always got the jobs and promotions she wanted. However, she wondered about the difference between her salary and that of men. Moreover, she stressed the way women have entered men’s territory, as “having a cigar and being part of the old boys’ network gets you some places that a girl has to either pretend to be like to get there and sometimes I think when a girl gets angry it’s treated differently, or if she gets assertive” (Hamre). Having said this, Lynne defined a woman according to gender attributes as submissive, calm and with lady-like fashions and attitudes.

Sister Donna emphasized the increase in the amount of women who participate in the workforce, as well as in the family as breadwinners. By saying that for some women it is getting more and more difficult to do work outside the home and simultaneously find time to do the housework, to some extent Sister Donna acknowledged and accepted women’s responsibility in the household. As for her own experience in the workforce, she felt protected as a woman because she belonged to a religious community, a situation that made the issue of gender discrimination a distant struggle for her. A totally different perspective came from Sister Katherine, who observed gender discrimination within the hierarchy of the church. She was appalled by the injustices towards women within the church, which she believes underestimates their capabilities and potential for enormous contributions. She disagreed with Sister Donna in her observation of the Catholic Church. Sister Donna claimed that religious women were a couple of decades ahead of other women because they had the benefit of their rights, as, for instance, they could run their own institutions. Conversely, Sister Katherine put emphasis on the injustices within the Catholic Church, because women, for example, are not allowed to be ordained. Sister Katherine’s particular observation of the church was a consequence of her experience working for an Archbishop in St. Paul. She was really bothered by the way men within the Catholic system treated her, without recognizing equality between men and women. This and other experiences turned Sister Katherine from a “nice Catholic girl” into a feminist. Furthermore, when she held a high position as chair of the religious department in St. Scholastica, even though she did have some voice, it was never as strong as that of the men’s. “Women’s voices are not accepted in the same ways, I don’t think, especially in the churches, but also in other institutions within our society.”

These women’s different perspectives in regard to gender differences and women’s roles at home and at work, shape their understanding of what makes a woman independent. Teresa, Lynne, Sister Donna, and Sister Katherine define independence according to their understanding of freedom, and their opinions on controversial issues like sexual education, birth control and abortion. Teresa Marie Gould defined an independent woman as one who can come and go as she pleases. At the same time, she argued, there is no true independence, as we are all dependent in some way. She was referring, specifically, to dependency on her husband. Teresa further argued that independence for her meant being able to support herself without having to count on her husband. She approved of the idea that children should receive sexual education within the family. She remembered that during her youth, whenever she showed interest in sexual education, her mother would reply that she would let her know once she got married. As a result, she entered her married life without knowing anything about a sexual life. Today, she holds the opinion that families should consider sexual education at home. However, they should do so with moderation because “sometimes if the kids know too much it is not good either.” Moreover, she said she did not believe in birth control, but in self-control, instead. She said she did not believe in abortion either, because she felt it was “a glorified word for murder.”

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With a different perspective on these issues, Lynne Hamre defined independence for a woman as the opportunity to make choices. She held the opinion that birth control was a necessary method to avoid giving birth to unwanted children and claimed that sex education is essential to overcome ignorance that leads to wrong decisions. For Sister Donna, an independent woman is a thinking woman who is not afraid to act on what she believes. On the issue of sexual education, she agreed with Lynne on the idea that ignorance can cause suffering and pain. Disagreeing with Teresa to an extent, she distinguished morality from basic necessary knowledge. A teacher of Biology, Sister Donna teaches her students about conception and sometimes brings speakers to class to inform them on natural family planning. In regard to her opinion about abortion, she rejected poverty as an excuse. She did not blame women who, living in poverty, decided to put an end to their pregnancy. She blamed the government instead, because, she said, it fails in recognizing poverty as a social problem and does not show interest in eradicating it. If government supported these women, she said, they would not feel the need for an abortion. Sister Donna seems to address the need for social justice in a society where inequality of class and gender are clearly identifiable. Sister Katherine went beyond Sister Donna’s concern for social justice in her observation of the role of feminism. She said that feminism reshaped the way in which she saw things. She pointed at feminism as the result of unjust treatment of women in many cultures and in many circumstances, and made clear her wish for a world in which justice is for all. The definition of independence for a woman varied from person to person and was, at times, attached to issues of social justice and the identification of oppression.

Both Sister Donna and Sister Katherine showed interest in a fair society. Both college professors and religious women, they identified their level of education as factors that have shaped their views. Sister Donna emphasized the great amount of time she spent on reading, thinking, observing things, and working with young people. Correspondingly, Sister Katherine claimed that the level of education she had achieved made a difference in the way she saw things, particularly about the conditions in society that need to be changed. Sister Donna said “it is a shame that a country as rich as the United States does not take care of the poor.” Sister Katherine would certainly agree on this observation over issues of justice, mainly owed to her view on the hierarchical construction of society. She gave insight into injustices in the world owed to the culture’s dualistic thinking, which sets those at the top with ascendancy over those at the bottom. She described this approach from a religious perspective, what she called “hierarchical dualism.” In this order of hierarchy God is at the top, the Pope underneath, then the Bishops, and finally people in general. This last category, she said, is divided into men, women and children, in this same respective order of ascendancy. And at the very bottom, this approach visualizes animals, plants, and lastly inanimate creation, like sand and rocks. Sister Katherine refutes this perspective and explains her understanding of all being part of creation, all being fellow creatures. And this, she argues, is the root cause of so many profound problems. With their understanding of the world, these women prove how much education plays a fundamental role in social awareness, just as Faye Wattleton’s experience demonstrated.

Wattleton’s achievements in life and the significance of her work for all women did not just happen in a vacuum. She carries a story of personal achievements from previous generations that were inspirational in her struggle for independence and success. Her mother had decided to pursue her own dreams. Instead of working long and exhausting hours under the sun, Faye’s mother had decided to become a minister in the Church of God. A preacher in different communities, she had been traveling from place to place, spreading the word of God and asking for the repentance of sins. In spite of their discrepancies, Faye and her mother, and previous generation of women, had succeeded in entering a territory that held controversy for the participation of women. Their mission was not accomplished without a tough fight, however. Just like her mother had answered her religious call despite the adversities society imposed, Faye answered her own call to enter a professional life, and later developed her strong determination to help women. Even though her father had thought spending money on his daughter’s education could be a waste of money, Faye managed to go to college, which proved to be a life-changing experience for her.

Four Women, Four Voices Similarly, Sister Katherine had been influenced by her mother’s strong will and political view. In

both cases the mother’s figure played an important role on their perception of the world. Furthermore, just like Sister Katherine and Sister Donna claimed, Faye’s education played a fundamental role on the way she saw the world. What Faye witnessed during her experience working with children, and later working in Planned Parenthood, caused her recognition of poverty as a factor in unwanted pregnancies and deaths of mothers through illegal abortions, and of children through malnutrition. She became socially aware and saw the need for social justice and the right of women to choose what to do with their own bodies. Just like Faye, the women interviewed also emphasized, at different levels, the need for women’s rights.

Teresa’s interest in women’s rights and her opinion regarding certain issues might differ from the other three women, but the tone of her voice, like the rest, speaks for her desire to be an independent woman. Teresa’s experience taking care of her mother when she was ill, not being able to finish what she called her “college nun studies” to come back home and take care of her family, and choosing a nurturing and family-based life instead, differ from the rest of the women interviewed. She did not receive the education that, according to both Sister Donna and Sister Katherine, makes a great difference in how you understand the rest of the world. Instead, she dedicated her life to love those closer to her and was not bothered by her dependence on her husband. Her opinion on politics and issues of abortion, for instance, demonstrate how her education and life choices shaped her views. All these women were asked whether they thought the country was ready for a woman president. Teresa replied affirmatively. Yet, she based her opinion on the argument that because a woman could run a home, she could certainly run a country. Sister Donna agreed with Teresa, but the reason for her opinion was that women might value life more. Sister Katherine said it was a shame that a country like the United States had not had yet a woman president. There seems to be a pattern based on the level of education achieved by these women. Some have been very dedicated to a life of involvement with social issues that concern women. Of the two Sisters, Sister Donna did not engage in politics and the women’s rights movement as much. She did recognize poverty and was socially aware but felt safe within the walls of a religious institution because she did not perceive gender discrimination. Conversely, Sister Katherine’s stronger commitment to gender equality is rooted in her emphasis on an unjust hierarchy, perceived through her understanding of liberation theology.

Some of these women experienced poverty first hand, while others did not. Some dedicated their lives to care primarily for their families, while others dedicated their lives to devotion to their faith or the poor. Some experienced gender discrimination, and some engaged in politics and the struggle for equality more than others. Despite their differences, these women have clearly noticed the presence of obstacles along their way to reach their full independence. These obstacles have affected them in different degrees. Their voices have been silenced at times abruptly and other times so subtly that they have not even noticed it. Some have submitted to a silencing force, and others continue struggling against it. Faye Wattleton once said that her satisfaction came from her commitment to advancing a better world. To each of these women a better world might be attributed to different commitments, but they surely all agree that this will not be possible until their rights are recognized. Analysis

My name is Sylvia Lorena Rodriguez, and I participated in a group project in which we conducted the interviews of four women in order to enhance our knowledge of women’s experiences in the United States. After comparing and contrasting these women’s diverse experiences with those of other women I have encountered in my studies, I recognize the essentiality of developing their intellectual capacity through higher education in order to succeed under the dominion of a strong patriarchal society. The more women educated themselves, the more they identified oppression based on gender assumptions. The level of education they received made them aware of the male-dominated society to which they were expected to surrender, as well as of the beneficial definition of gender roles that placed males on top of the hierarchy with ascendancy over females. The common belief in female inferiority required women to hold only certain positions at their workplace, receive wages unequal to men, be in control of the household, bear children, and never question the word of the alleged superior sex. Women were deterred from taking a stand for their right to equality, and discouraged from making decisions that concerned their

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own bodies. From birth control to abortion, these issues became the battleground for religious and political debates, where men often ruled over women’s bodies.

Teresa Mary Gould, Sister Donna Schroeder, and Sister Katherine McLaughlin experienced a wealth of home-stay propaganda that limited their higher educational options. As they were in their twenties when the war was over, they could not take advantage of the propaganda machine that had dominated the war years and had encouraged women to participate in the workforce. Instead, they experienced an incredible shift of opportunities. Females were being labeled once again according to their femininity. Gender became again a systematic categorization of features; motherhood, submissiveness, and nurture were the attributes of womanliness. While some recognized this injustice and expressed their fury, others surrendered to their discrimination. Sister Katherine clearly states this, and recognizes that sisterhood was a better alternative than what she called a “Mrs. Degree.” Teresa, on the other hand, who was attending to her sisterhood call, was drawn into a home life by the death of her mother and the lack of alternative when the Sisters, who noticed her homesickness, encouraged her to settle down instead of continuing her studies. In the case of Teresa, family considerations were essential for her decision-making process.

The presence of women in their families, in particular, were of great influence. Whereas Teresa Mary Gould developed a preference for raising a family, as a result of the absence of her mother, Sister Katherine was inspired by her mother’s strength and strong political will and decided to opt for the pursuit of professional education, only possible through her religious career.

In regard to their religious careers, it is important to observe that both Sisters held different views in regard to women’s participation and roles in the Church. Whereas Sister Donna found protection in the Church and felt that discrimination against women was a distant experience for her, Sister Katherine was appalled by the hierarchy of the Church. Her devotion to liberation theology and social justice assisted in her realization of inequality within the hierarchy of the Church.

Another ground for disagreement of opinions is women’s right to equality. Even though Lynne lived through a somewhat less discriminatory society, she still wondered about differences in wages, for instance. In the case of Teresa, it is clear that her preference for a dedication to her family and home shaped her view of women’s participation in the workforce. Without a doubt, the absence of higher education forced her to succumb to the hegemony of gender roles. This was distinguishable not only in the debate over workforce but also over politics and women’s reproductive rights.

There is no mention of reproductive rights from Teresa, a woman who had given up to her college education and who recognized her dependency on her husband, in her comparison of abortion with murder and her preference for abstinence. On the other hand, more educated women held the opinion that there were social implications behind the issue of reproductive rights. Injustices in today’s society like the lack of proper welfare programs, and the decreasing support for family planning programs, in addition to poverty and the obstacles to gaining access to what little is available, were probably not a consideration taken by Teresa when she gave her opinion over reproductive rights. Conclusion

Faye Wattleton was once quoted by saying that “[Her] satisfaction comes from [her] commitment to advancing a better world.” Throughout history, many women in the United States have taken a stand for their rights, and have fought battles against unscrupulous discrimination with the objective of achieving equality. They have repeatedly been condemned for their neurotic feminism, mainly under the lead of chauvinism and often with the support of subservient women. The significance women have attributed to the pursuit of intellectual development has broadened their horizons. There is certainly a growing concern surrounding the continuing bigotry towards women’s realization of their equal status in this century, and one can only hope that the inspirational struggle will continue.

Four Women, Four Voices Works Cited

Gould, Teresa Mary. Interview with Elizabeth Maganzini. Personal Interview. November 2005 Hamre, Lynne. Interview with Bryan Simon. Personal Interview. November 2005 McLaughlin, Sister Katherine. Interview with Sylvia Lorena Rodriguez. Personal Interview. November 2005 Norton, Mary Beth, and Alexander, Ruth, eds. Major Problems in American Women’s History. Boston, New York: 2003

Low, Ann Marie. “Dust Bowl Diary” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). Major Problems in American Women’s History, Eds. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth Alexander. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003

Lundberg, Ferdinand and Farnham, Marynia F. “Modern Woman: The Lost Sex” (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1947). Major Problems in

American Women’s History, Eds. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth Alexander. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003

Bromley, Dorothy Dunbar, “Birth Control and the Depression” (New Harper’s Monthly Magazine, October 1934). Major Problems in American Women’s

History, Eds. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth Alexander. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003

Schroeder, Sister Donna. Interview with Andrea West. Personal Interview. November 2005 Wattleton, Faye. Life on the Line. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996

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The Scriptorium: The Publication and the Women Within It Elisabeth Connolly

The College of St. Scholastica is a place very rich in history. With this sense of history ingrained in

students, faculty and alumni comes a sense of pride: pride in the work done to bring the College to its current achievements, pride in its traditions, and pride in the women who founded the institution. However, something is lost in this inordinate sense of nostalgic pride. The faces of the women who attended the College become a blurred mass. Questions about who these women were and what their lives were like sent me searching in the archives at the College of St. Scholastica library, and directly to the Scriptorium. The Scriptorium, an entirely student-published newspaper, existed from 1932 to 1968. In that time, the newspaper changed considerably, so it is difficult for one to generalize about the type of articles. However, a theme is clear throughout the years of publication: for women at the College of St. Scholastica, college became a way of emphasizing already-existing ideas and at the same time a way to break away from traditional ideas about women’s roles, careers, and lives. The articles in the Scriptorium show a duality which the students must have experienced in their college careers. They were certainly clinging to old ideas and ways of life, but at the same time were experiencing new ideas about the roles of women and their place in the world. For the purposes of this research paper, I have limited my study to the time spanning the years 1935 to 1945. My reasons for this are several. First, studying the entire thirty-six year span of the publication would have been a daunting task; therefore I decided to study a ten-year span. I chose 1935 as a starting date simply because that is where the archive’s collection starts. It is also convenient that this time-span covers the beginning of World War II. I felt that this marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, and that it would be too difficult to discuss two different eras in one research project. Finally, I chose an earlier time period because I was particularly interested in getting as close to the beginnings of the College as possible. I chose to use the Scriptorium, as opposed to other documents in the archives, because it was written entirely by students. I believe this gives me the best insights into what they valued, what they believed was important, and what they thought of the world around them. In many ways, I was right.

IN CONTEXT: ST. SCHOLASTICA AND OTHER WOMEN’S COLLEGES

The era during which the Scriptorium was published was one of particular importance for higher education for women. Historians refer to this era as the “Third Generation,” the first generation of college women having attended during and immediately after the Civil War, and the second generation attending during the turn of the 20th century (Solomon, 1985). These generations of women served as trailblazers for the Third Generation, who entered college in a fairly accepting atmosphere. Estelle Freedman points out that, despite the oversights of many historians studying women’s issues in the early 20th century, the women’s movement did not end with the passage of the nineteenth amendment. The women’s movement continued into the 1920s with the Progressive movement, thus creating a long movement towards acceptance of women in colleges and universities, and a movement towards women in the public sphere (Freedman, 1974, 373).

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This is not to say, however, that women students in the Progressive era did not experience any unkind actions. Certainly, students experienced much resistance from both male students and male professors, but this was largely concentrated in coeducational colleges and universities, and those women’s colleges who were connected to specific men’s or coeducational colleges, such as those out east. Women’s colleges became known during this time as “Little Eden”, a paradise or haven for women who were looking to succeed in life and make the most out of their education. Lynn Gordon states that despite the overwhelming stereotype that women “had less interest in their studies and fewer reasons to prepare for self-support,” there are, in fact, many examples of women who actually made careers of their college degrees and found their professional lives important after graduation (Gordon, 1990, 5). The College of St. Scholastica was experiencing all of these movements and feelings at the time the Scriptorium was published. While women were making headway in their struggle to achieve some form of equality with men in both the professional and educational sphere, Catholic women’s colleges afforded the students an opportunity to succeed without harassment or naysaying.

OLD IDEAS There is evidence in the Scriptorium of the College as an agent for instilling already prevalent ideas about women and society. Some evidence of this is the religious tones of some articles, the frequency with which social news was published, and the evidence of traditional views of women found within the Scriptorium. Religion was a strong theme throughout the Scriptorium’s publication. Earlier editions of the paper particularly had heavily religious overtones. The paper included on its second page for 9 years a “Sedes Sapientiae” article with a scriptural reflection (“Sedes,” 1935-1944). A special Lenten reflection was included in editions during Lent. In addition to regular articles, various articles with religious themes were published, such as a reflection on how the addition of the grotto would help foster the Catholic spirit on campus (“Grotto,” 1936) and an article about the world as Mary would have seen it when she walked the earth (“When Mary,” 1940). Besides the articles written on religious topics, religious clubs were prominently featured in the Scriptorium for the entire ten year span. The Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a social club dedicated to the Holy Mother, was mentioned in nearly every issue from 1935 to 1945, whether in the social columns or in various articles. The Sodality had its own issue, published each May in special blue ink rather than the normal black, and the front page was usually dedicated to the May Day ceremony and the crowning of the May Queen, which usually merited front page honors, as when Mary O’Brien was selected in 1936 (“May Queen,” 1936). While there were certainly students at St. Scholastica who were not Catholic, this theme of Catholicism and religiousness shows the importance of religious values in the lives of students. Certainly the foundation of Catholic colleges across the nation was the Catholic faith and religion (Solomon, 1985, 153). Articles speak of “seeking God” and turning away from worldly matters to more spiritual ones (“Grotto,” 1936). This shows the mindset of the female students at a Catholic college such as St. Scholastica. They saw their campus not only as a place of learning, but a spiritual city on a hill. It was a place for them to become stronger in their faith, and a refuge in the increasingly materialistic world of the early 20th century. In addition to religious norms, the College also acted as an agent of emphasizing social norms in its students. One sign of this is the amount of society and club news. Each edition published news about what sorts of activities clubs were hosting. Often included were descriptions of the latest initiations for the various social clubs on campus, including the large number of Greek letter clubs. The December 11, 1935 edition published a “who wore what” column about the latest formal dance (“She Went,” 1935). Sometimes these society news columns would fill nearly half a page. A poll of students done by the newspaper showed that even to this point, students felt that there wasn’t enough society and club news included (“Scriptorium Readers,”1936). Besides the society columns, there were “gossip” columns that gave informal news about activities beyond those sponsored by clubs. News included a bridal shower

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thrown for a student, where “the bride was presented with Fiestaware” (“College,” 1938). An article proclaimed, “Seen about school: Margie Geistman in slacks!” (“Seen,” 1936). While none of these articles are overtly overbearing, they still act as an agent for instilling cultural norms. Taken as a worst-case, these articles systematically let the students of the College know that they were being watched and had to conform to the norms of those who attended the College. More likely, these social columns reflected the genuine constraints of the societies from which the students came. The outcry for more society and club news articles implies that students did not generally see these articles as stifling. However, intentional or not, these articles most definitely sent the message to students that their social lives were being monitored, and that any diversion from the mainstream (as in the case of Margie Geistman’s slacks) would be noted. Also notable were articles which promoted a traditional view of women. The aforementioned article “When Mary Walked The Earth” held Mary as a pinnacle of femininity, to be admired for her feminine traits (“When Mary,” 1940). Each spring, the students elected nine of their peers to represent the “Nine Ideals,” feminine traits which were expected of the students at the College: poise, loyalty, friendliness, spirituality, love of scholarship, courtesy, appreciativeness, initiative, and honesty (“Sophomore,” 1939). It is remarkable that not only did these Nine Ideals exist, but that students viewed them as an honor and sought to achieve that recognition. Besides the virtues and ideals of women, there were also articles promoting more physical aspects of femininity. An article in 1938 instructed students on cultivating poise (“Poise,” 1938). A later article detailed a “Miss St. Scholastica” pageant, extolling the “perfect figure” required of the competitors (“Miss St. Scholastica,” 1941). As with the social constraints on students, these articles appear to be a reflection of the societal values and beliefs about womanhood and femininity, passed on to the institution itself. These articles became less frequent as time went on and as the United States entered World War II, which will be discussed later.

NEW EXPERIENCES Certainly, students at The College of St. Scholastica encountered new ideas and experiences throughout their college careers. It is evident from the Scriptorium that the students grappled with these new ideas and experiences. They include relationships with fellow students and professors, new ideas about independence, career choice and success. Of utmost interest and importance were the new ideas and roles that students encountered through their experiences with World War II. Like many college students today, students who attended The College of St. Scholastica in the early years created a tight-knit community at their college. At such a small women’s college, students developed very close relationships. A great deal of this is evident in the amount of personal information included in the Scriptorium. A column ran in nearly every edition as a sort of “guess-who,” describing students and allowing the readers to guess before revealing the mystery person’s identity. This column took the title “Pithy Portraits” in the early years of the Scriptorium, and later became “Pen Pics.” It took the form of “Bioscriptions” in the 1940s. A “Pithy Portraits” column on January 9, 1938, ran the following:

Witty…dark, naturally curly hair…spent her freshman year at Superior State Teachers’…vice president of the Phi Sigs and a W.A.A….trickster…pours “catchup” on everything she eats…popular with everyone…you know, June Bishop…Tall, blonde, and blasé…a dizzy dramatist and an expert golfer…has an interest in Cornell and architects…comes from Green Bay... “Pennie Kerwin” (“Portraits,” 1938). Also worth noting are polls published by the Scriptorium. Such questions as students plans over

winter break (“Holiday,” 1938) and little-known facts about freshmen (“Did You Know,” 1940) include individual quotes with personal information, such as the fact that “Bette Lorang was president of the senior class at Flat Head County High School in Kalispell, Montana” and that “Jean Bergfalk, Lorrain

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Gonyea, Patricia Beaumont, and Genevieve Maher were valedictorians of their respective classes.” All these, along with the society and club columns mentioned before, show the closeness of individual students with one another. Not only were the students close, it is apparent that students fostered this closeness. The “Did You Know” articles about freshmen show how the older students brought younger students into the fold, welcoming them into a community that was more family than friends. The amount of jokes and playfulness evident in the Scriptorium is also worth noting. The paper reads almost cryptically, with inside jokes about students; these even become hard to decipher at times. An excerpt from early 1936 reads: “Did anyone notice the individuality of Marj’s costume that she wore last week? Must have been a creation from Saks Fifth Avenue…We wish to express our sympathy to the girls who were caught hiding in closets to avoid convocation. We know how it is (“Scraps,” 1936).” The fact that students published these inside jokes quite publicly is an indication of the closeness of their relationships; surely, the Scriptorium would not publish such things if only a few readers could understand them. Hence, information and events must have flowed quickly, indicating the closeness of the student body as a whole. It shows the playful spirit of the students that Gordon commented on, stating that college became a place for “developing a group identity and defying official attempts to control them and subdue [the students’] youthful good spirits” (Gordon, 1990, 37). Students showed close connections with not only their peers, but professors and Sisters as well. An early article lists famous sayings of various professors on campus, showing through this the familiarity and connection that students had with their professors (“Sayings,” 1936). When a Sister died unexpectedly while traveling abroad, the news merited a front page story, reassuring the students that “her thoughts were with you to the end” (“Sister,” 1938). In several editions, a sympathy column is included for deaths in the families of not only students, but of Sisters faculty as well. These show the closeness and affection that students had for the Sisters and professors, making the community at The College of St. Scholastica very broad indeed. Along with the new relationships students found at college, there is much evidence in the Scriptorium showing how students dealt with the new independence they found at college. One of the earliest editions discusses at length the recent abolishment of compulsory study hours. Students were polled and gave their opinion on the change--unanimously in favor, of course (“Study Hours,” 1936). A second opinion article was published, proclaiming the new voluntary study hours to have relieved a burden placed on students, but that they would be a new test on the independence of the students (“Measure,” 1936). Interestingly, students seemed to be most opinionated about classwork, especially during the early years. An article entitled “Mutiny on the Bounty” gave, in dramatic fashion, a riposte on the amount of homework required of students (“Mutiny,” 1936). In a later article, students gave their opinions on the grading system at the College (“Students,” 1942). From this evidence we can gather that, however trivial opinions about classwork may be, students were beginning to think independently. The article about compulsory study hours in particular shows that students valued individuality and freedom. The amount of feedback in favor of voluntary study hours is indicative of an appreciation of and desire for independence.

At the same time that these women were grappling with ideas about their place in the world, they were choosing careers and paths in life. Although many students certainly went the traditional route and became homemakers, several pieces in the Scriptorium show that many students had career goals in mind. Of particular interest is a poll of seniors, asking them to describe their plans for graduation. Of the 20 seniors polled, 14 outlined specific career goals. Not only did they have specific goals, but some of these goals were fairly lofty. Ann Grevich hoped to “have a position in one of the Range schools teaching biology,” while Mary Murphy looked to “get into…some original business” and Mary Babcock asserted, “I want to be an Executive Secretary of the Child Welfare Board, and nothing less!” (“What Of,” 1937). These refute the stereotype that female college students in the early 20th century did not care about the career options that higher education opened to them.

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News from alumni also tells a different story. Many columns containing alumni news show that alumni of the College went on to not only start families, but continue to have successful careers as teachers, nurses, journalists, and many other professions. One went on to be a war correspondent in World War II (“We Present,” 1942). Female students from The College of St. Scholastica were definitely going on to make achievements in their professional lives. As well as career-related achievements, St. Scholastica students also made achievements in their studies. Articles give impressive numbers for Honor students, with a grand total of 82 in 1941 (“Registrar,” 1941). The Monocle Club, a literary association at the College, published a weekly article with poems, short stories and other literary works. An article compared the rating of Vassar College with that of St. Scholastica in a recent issue of Mademoiselle, which found St. Scholastica to have “knowledge and fun plus culture in good equal doses,” and no one could argue with the fact that St. Scholastica students “think their College best of all” (“Rating,” 1940). Students at The College of St. Scholastica were obviously proud of the achievements of their classmates and alumni, both in the academic sphere and the professional world. Along with these new ideas of the achievements of women came new ideas about womanhood and the feminine sphere. A great many of these ideas coincide with the beginnings of World War II and questions of how students could get involved in the war effort. Students were asked to pray for the president (“Prayers,” 1943). A stamp drive was held in the College, and the students even crowned a Stamp Queen, the girl who sold the most stamps for the war effort and who claimed honors nearly as high as those held by the May Queen (“Stamp,” 1943). Articles detailed “how to serve the country as a woman” (1943). An article entitled “The Role of the College Girl in the Crisis” discussed how exactly students could support the armed forces (1944). A rather large advertisement solicited girls to apply for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (1943). These demonstrate the involvement that the students felt with the war, and mirror the efforts of American women in general to support the war effort. With these war-related activities came an increased interest in politics and world events. Although social articles still existed, new columns about world events and politics proliferated. Front page articles ran in the fall and early winter of 1938, describing the Hitler Youth regime and the European front in the war (“Hitler Prepares” and “Hitler’s Germany,” 1938). “30-30,” a column about world events and news headlines, began in 1938. It had a short run, and mostly focused on unusual headlines and local news. In 1940, the column saw a resurgence and began to focus on world events and coverage of the war. The Scriptorium staff published a special “Defense” edition of the paper in 1942. Not only were news articles published, but students began to write opinion articles as well. “30-30” became a soapbox for students to voice their opinions about the war, with students stating that it was “about time Americans woke up” and paid attention to world events (1942). An article on war-time economies and rations made the paper (“Economics,” 1942). Students even went so far as to publish quotes about whether or not women should be drafted (“Collegians,” 1942). Students held a mock election in 1944, showing their new interest in domestic politics (“As St. Scholastica Goes,” 1944). With this new interest in world events came the beginnings of international education. The early forties saw several students from around the world arrive at The College of St. Scholastica to study. Two Bolivian students entered the College in 1944, and were given the recognition of a front page article (Santa Cruz and Shulte, 1944). A heartfelt letter was published from Su Min Yang, an international student from China who achieved some popularity while at the school and even became attendant to the May Queen in 1941. Addressed to Mother Agnes Somers, the faculty, and the students, the letter began:

It does not seem possible that time has actually come for me to say ‘Farewell’ to The College of St. Scholastica and my friends. Inasmuch as I have longed most eagerly for this time to come, yet my heart aches to think that…I may never see some of my friends again...I wish to thank you all most sincerely for your kind, courteous, and friendly attitudes towards me (“Farewell,” 1941).

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As the United States entered World War II, a dramatic shift in the types and style of articles became apparent. Articles became shorter, and included less flowery prose, as more and more articles about world politics and events crowded the pages. The second page, previously reserved for religious articles and literary submissions, began to include more and more articles about political events, and it was here that “30-30” found its home. While students were becoming more opinionated on political issues, they still concentrated to a certain extent on issues at home, as they did before. Taken together, these articles show that at the very least, students were impacted by World War II and interacted with the events they encountered, making meaning of them for their own lives. However, the opinion articles have greater implications. Students were faced with new and challenging ideas during this time about what it meant to be a woman and the role for them in society. Students at The College of St. Scholastica were particularly well-placed at this time; in an academic setting, students were bound to think critically about the events occurring around them. Students must have been well-disposed to reflection on what these events meant for them and their roles as women, as is evident in these articles. Through these events, students were also thrust into a new, global perspective, and encountered new ideas about the world as they viewed it. They used the context that they knew—religion, relationships, and womanhood—to relate to the world and the people they encountered in it.

CONCLUSION These articles obviously have implication for our understanding of the students at The College of St. Scholastica in the early twentieth century. First, they show a duality which the students must have experienced in their college careers. They were certainly clinging to old ideas and ways of life. Their religion remained important to them, and they still adhered to previous ideas about society and the role of women in the world. At the same time, however, the female students of the College were exploring new ideas about the roles of women and their place in the world. It is possible that the students of the College held onto these ideas while at the same time revising them and coming to terms with the new ideas they faced. However, I believe that these ten years show a snapshot in the changing atmosphere for women at The College of St. Scholastica. Motivated by outside forces, including society in general and the changes due to World War II, The College of St. Scholastica itself became a mirror of what was occurring in the world at large. The students still held on to old beliefs, and looked to the Church for inspiration and answers to troubling questions. At the same time, they embraced their newfound independence, and reacted to events they viewed around them. Obviously, World War II served as a catalyst for many of these mixed feelings of students. The new world events pushed women into the public sphere, and at least at St. Scholastica, they gladly welcomed these new experiences. Women students and alumni succeeded academically and professionally, and found interest in world events, taking part in issues and expressing their opinions through the Scriptorium. While students found refuge in some traditional ideas of women, they also took interest in the new opportunities that were opened to them through their college experience. This new historical understanding of the women who attended The College of St. Scholastica during the early 20th century is something of which students today can truly be proud.

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Works Cited Cirtautas, K. C. (1962). The American College Girl. New York: The Citadel Press. Crawford, Mary Caroline. (1905). The College Girl of America, and the Institutions Which Make Her What She Is. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. Freedman, Estelle B. (1974). The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s. Journal of American History, 61(1), 372-393.

Gordon, Lynn D. (1990). Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Prose, Sister M. Redempta. (1943). The Liberal Arts Ideal In Catholic Colleges for Women in the United States. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press.

Solomon, Barbara Miller. (1985). In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

The College of St. Scholastica. (1935-1945). College of St. Scholastica Scriptorium. (Vols. 3-13). Duluth, MN: The College of St. Scholastica. “The Sweetest gift of a college is the memories it gives to its daughters. Years may erase a knowledge of split infinitives and botanical terms. But years can only increase the poignant memories that are forever associated with genuine college tradition” (Some College Traditions, May 13, 1936).

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Feminism and the Body: Deconstructing the Myth of Women as “Tradition” in the Colonial State C. Neal Keye, Ph.D

Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not as a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the “Third World Woman” caught between tradition and modernization….

– Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” “Europe” is literally the creation of the Third World.

– Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Since the pathbreaking publication of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in the 1960s, the critical

and historical study of colonialism and its forms of knowledge has forced a radical questioning of the disciplinary history of anthropology, literary studies, and the history of religions.1 And while this unapologetically materialist mode of questioning the obscene underside of the modern history of ideas has been rejected by scholars on both the right and the left, it has undeniably set the terms of debate for many of us writing in the vibrant new spaces of critical theory and cultural studies. Indeed, the appearance of “postcolonial” studies on the American critical scene has demonstrated with precision that the very origins of disciplinary traditions such as anthropology and the history of religions may be traced back to the earliest cross-cultural spaces and contact zones of European empire, the social and historical genealogy of which writers such as Gayatri Spivak have so remarkably described.2 From Spivak’s trenchant critiques of the social text of imperialism in literary studies to Michael Taussig’s ethnographic montage of terror and healing in the Putamayo region of southwest Colombia,3 the lived realities of colonial violence have become the subject of lively, interdisciplinary debate. As a result, the legacy of the European Enlightenment and the “civilizing mission” it helped set in motion has been rendered deeply problematic. More and more, critical studies of the modern West have come to understand the Enlightenment’s master narrative of the progressive liberation of humanity (Kant) and the speculative unity of knowledge (Hegel) as both the condition and effect of imperialist forms of knowledge, power, and history-making.

One of the assumptions of this article is that something definitive has been achieved by these studies in cultural history, something that marks the absolute limits of western “historicist” narratives of progressive modernization. Another is that the widespread effort in the Euro-American academy today to discredit these interventions in the politics of knowledge may be construed as an essentially defensive maneuver, one that has serious implications for the way academic disciplines negotiate the past, not least its often uncanny claims on the present. As we shall see in relation to the rather precarious place of women’s bodily specificity in the various native “traditions” canonized by colonial discourses on India and Africa, the vexed relations between concepts such as “religion,” “culture,” “tradition,” and “women”

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possess a temporality and historicity that is the task of critical theory and cultural studies to trace. If, according to Freud, we repeat what we cannot remember, then the anxious desire on both sides of the Atlantic to repress, if not actively deny, the implication of these concepts in the colonial expansion of Europe is tantamount to repeating the imperialist project itself.

With this in mind, this article is about the myth of women as the embodiment of religious “tradition” in the colonial state. Whether one examines the early nineteenth century debates over the abolition of sati (the Hindu “rite” of widow burning) in British India, or, more recently, the debates over the practice of clitoridectomy in Africa, inscriptions of women’s experience have been crucial to the discursive formation of religion, culture, and tradition in the colonial state. While these official debates often express deep concern for women’s rights and agency, as Lata Mani has shown in her critique of both British and indigenous discourses on sati in British India, they are paradoxically not about women but rather about what authorizes and consecrates authentic religious and cultural tradition.4 Contrary to the widespread belief that the British worked to abolish sati on humanitarian grounds and in the name of women’s fundamental rights, the utter horror of the rite itself – of the burning of women – was a relatively marginal concern. In fact, the liberal thematics of women’s victimization in early nineteenth century “abolitionist” discourse on sati ultimately served to represent the essential “backwardness” of Indian social life, as well as the moral legitimacy of the British “civilizing mission.” Similarly, as Susan Pederson has argued in her provocative history of the moral campaign against clitoridectomy in British Kenya, the effort to prohibit female genital mutilation was fatally undermined by masculinist assumptions about the nature of race, sexuality, and nation.5

These inscriptions of “religion” and “tradition” on the lives and bodies of women present a challenge to historical studies of modern discourse on religion and culture, one which I will address by way of the following questions: In what ways were terms such as religion, culture, tradition, and women radically reinscribed by colonial debates on ritual practices such as sati and clitoridectomy? How do such colonial reinscriptions turn on the question of women’s agency, or, better yet, lack of it? To what extent can questions about women’s difference in the colonial state be discussed in terms of the policing of authentic religious tradition? How does official British imperial discourse on women and tradition haunt contemporary debates on sati in India and clitoridectomy in Africa, and is there, today, a way to transvalue these very debates? If, as Spivak insists, the gendered subaltern cannot speak, can she be effectively represented by the disciplinary historian or ethnographer, feminist or otherwise? If not, is she doomed to a total unrepresentability? Or, caught, as it were, in a violent shuttling between patriarchy and imperialism, tradition and modernity, does she mark that space of the other in hegemonic anthropology and historiography? In any case, as part of a much wider polemic in feminist cross-cultural studies today – the place of women in colonial social formations – it is to the displaced historical figure of women-in-imperialism that I turn now.

II In Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, the feminist historian Lata Mani traces the

violence engendered by British representations of women as tradition in early nineteenth century debates on sati. While dominant historiography would have us believe that the British abolition of sati in 1829 reflects the growing concern for the status of women that emerges during the nineteenth century, Mani’s analysis of both British and indigenous archival sources suggests otherwise. For example, the prohibition of sati was preceded by its legislation in 1813, according to which the practice was permitted if the widow’s decision was “voluntary.” More importantly, the brutal fact of sati’s cruelty to women was not the primary legal grounds for its prohibition. On the contrary, the British legislative effort to outlaw sati turned on philological questions of scriptural interpretation. Here is Mani’s brief summary of the origins of official colonial discourse on sati:

Official discourse on sati was prompted by deliberation on whether it could be safely prohibited through legislation. The concern with safety was premised on the belief that the practice had a basis in scripture and that interference in a religious matter might provoke indigenous outrage.

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Those opposed to abolition thus emphasized its “religious” basis and the dangers of intervention, while those in favor of outlawing sati stressed its “material” aspects (such as the family’s desire to be rid of the financial burden of supporting the widow), and thus the safety of legislative prohibition.6

At issue, then, was not the utter cruelty of sati, but whether or not it was sanctioned by authentic religious and cultural tradition. Given the effect of Orientalist discourses on India since the eighteenth century – culminating in the myth of the Aryan – the locus of this authenticity was not surprisingly believed to be brahmanic scripture. Thus, while British colonial officials clearly differed with regard to the question of prohibition, the basic terms of the debate – ancient “Aryan” scripture and tradition – was never contested. For this reason, Mani’s interest is not with who was for or against sati, as interesting as that story may be, but rather with the discursive formation of the debate itself, and with how particular positions were argued and defended. What both sides of the debate had in common was thus the Orientalist belief in the centrality of scripture in Indian cultural life, unthinking native obedience to these ancient texts, and the essentially “religious” nature of sati itself. Given this scripturalization of Indian ritual practices, the question of sati’s violence to women was marginal from the very outset, even as the sentimentalized figure of “woman” became central to both British and indigenous male elite’s representations of Indian “religion,” “culture,” and “tradition.”

How to describe this displaced figure of woman in colonial debates uttered in her name? Perhaps if we hold with Mani that women were neither subjects nor objects, but rather the ideological ground of official discourse on sati we find some sign of what this question involves for feminist studies of women and religion in early colonial India:

It is my contention that although sati became an alibi for the colonial civilizing mission on the one hand, and on the other hand, a significant occasion for indigenous autocritique, the women who burned were neither subjects nor even the primary objects of concern in the debate on its prohibition. They were, rather, the ground for a complex and competing set of struggles over Indian society and definitions of Hindu tradition. The debate, in which public opinion was mobilized in India and Britain alike, inaugurated a process whereby an exceptional and caste-specific practice was to emerge in the West as a potent signifier of the oppression of all Indian women, and thereby of the degradation of India as a whole.7

As privileged site for the contestation of Indian traditions and customs, the precarious condition

of women’s experience emerges as a metaphor for the debased nature of “India” itself. What is more, the interpretive questions that shaped the debate – whether or not sati was sanctioned by scripture, and, if so, was the widow’s decision to immolate herself voluntary – also served as an effective alibi for the British implication in the early nineteenth century outbreak of sati in the first place. For, as Ashis Nandy has pointed out, the epidemic of sati in eastern India in the early years of British rule was inextricably linked to the massive social and cultural dislocations effected by the East India Company after 17658 – the year the Company became rulers as well as traders. The question of whether sati was legally to be considered homicide or ritually sanctioned suicide, however, effectively effaced these violent social and political dislocations. Critical attention to the debate on the scriptural sanction of sati thus must persistently annotate this repression of the colonial legacy of widow burning, one which, if the liberal middle-class reaction to the sati committed by Roop Kanwar in Rajasthan in 1987 is any indication, continues to this day.9

If, according to dominant interpretations of the British civilizing mission, the abolition of sati marks a turning point in the history of India, one in which the question of women’s rights and emancipation take center stage, Mani’s reading of this history makes it powerfully clear that the colonial debate on widow burning offered the British an unprecedented opportunity to reinscribe authentic Indian

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cultural tradition. Indeed, what better rite than sati to represent the essential difference between barbaric Hindu tradition and British civilization?

In any case, in the wake of Mani’s deconstructive historiography of British discourse on sati, it is impossible not to contend with her that India’s experience with colonial modernity produced much, if not all, of what has taken to be authentic Indian religious traditions, and that the interlocking ground of this reinscription is “woman” and ancient brahmanic scripture. The archival sources on sati documenting the contestation of Indian religious tradition thus bear the indelible mark of specifically colonial discourse, one which both authorized and canonized authentic Hindu religious practice. Consequently, the debate is deeply implicated in the discursive formation of Indian tradition itself. If, however, Mani’s materialist rendering of this colonial fabrication of the scriptural origins of Hindu law makes it impossible not to construe the official debate in this way, where does that leave the figure of woman? If she was fundamentally marginal to the debate, does this then imply her “voice” was completely suppressed? And, if not, how are we to hear such a voice, if not as the idealist expression of a deep subjectivity? According to Gayatri Spivak’s essay on the archival sources of sati, recall, the figure of the woman disappears, for, caught between patriarchy and imperialism, there is simply no place for her to speak:

One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness. Such a testimony would be ideology-transparent or “fully” subjective, of course, but it would have constituted the ingredients for producing a countersentence. As one goes down the grotesquely mistranscribed names of these women, the sacrificed widows, in the police reports included in the records of the East India Company, one cannot put together a “voice.” The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account.10

Now, as Robert Young points out in his chapter on Spivak in White Mythologies: Writing History and

the West, the problem here is not so much that Hindu women cannot speak as such, or that no records of the complex subjectivity of women exist, but “that she is assigned no position of enunciation: `there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak.’”11 As a result, British officials and indigenous male elites never cease speaking for her. According to Spivak, “what the British see as poor victimised women going to the slaughter is in fact an ideological battleground,”12 one that is fraught with both patriarchal and imperialist assumptions about the (non)place of women in Indian religion and culture. Indeed, as the volatile discourse of what the British perceive as scripturally sanctioned Hindu ritual is transformed into what they perceive as murder, “one diagnosis of female free will is substituted for another.”13 In the wake of this transformation of early colonial Hinduism, the “dubious place of the free will of the constituted sexed subject as female was successfully effaced,”14 for, as Spivak’s reading concludes, her subject-position was obliterated by the very terms of the debate. As Young suggests in White Mythologies, Spivak’s pedagogical insistence that “the subaltern cannot speak” is in many ways her “most far-reaching argument of all, posing radical questions to all orthodox and even subaltern forms of historicization.”15

In “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” for example, Spivak argues that the gendered subaltern marks the absolute limit of historiography written in the modern West. For, given the radical epistemic violence of the imperialist project in India, the critique of this very violence cannot merely proceed by way of the writing of alternative, “nativist” histories. Rather, since the ethnographic desire to write from a nativist position often betrays a narcissistic desire for the self-consolidating other of modern subjectivity, critiques of imperialist forms of knowledge such as the discourse on sati must always already acknowledge “that the arena of the subaltern’s persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian.” In other words, transvaluations of the social text of colonial knowledge, power, and history-making must persistently acknowledge “that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”16

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While Spivak readily admits this is a hard lesson to learn from the institutional site of the Euro-American academy, she also stresses that “not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice.”17 Nevertheless, as Young’s reading of Spivak does not fail to point out, the argument that “the subaltern cannot speak” has been one of the most difficult for Spivak’s readers to digest. Among these readers, I contend, Lata Mani holds a privileged place. For, while many critics have indignantly pointed out that Spivak is simply not able (or willing) to hear the voice of the native,18 Mani takes Spivak’s strategic position on the subaltern as absolute limit of historiography and ethnography quite seriously. That is, she acknowledges that Spivak’s analysis of the woman-in-imperialism must be read in the context of her searching interrogation of the speaking positions of colonialist archival sources, as well as her “well-founded rejection of any simplistic desire to counter discourses of domination by `letting the native speak.’”19 That being said, Mani has several doubts about Spivak’s position as a “general conclusion about colonial discourse,” suggesting that she forecloses “too quickly a set of complex issues about voice and agency.”20 In her unforgettable, visceral chapter on the materiality of widow-burning, “The Female Subject, the Colonial Gaze: Eyewitness Accounts of Sati,” Mani raises the following questions about Spivak’s position:

In claiming “the subaltern cannot speak,” does Spivak mean “cannot” as in “does not know to” or “cannot” in the sense of “is unable to under the circumstances”? Further, is there not a slippage between noting, as she does, that the female subaltern does not speak in police records of the East India Company, and in concluding from this that “the subaltern cannot speak” at all, in any voice, however refracted?21

In this chapter, Mani emphasizes that in the face of reports on the violence and cruelty of widow burning, it is impossible for her simply to return the gaze of analytic scrutiny back on the colonizer. Moreover, she writes, these reports make it impossible “to disarticulate the violence of the rhetoric from that of the practice.”22 For Mani, not only is the violence of sati “in constant tension with the `epistemic violence’ of colonialism” traced by Spivak.23 Rather, and more importantly, accounts of the violence of widow burning call into question colonial assumptions about Indian women’s lack of political agency. By reading these reports “against the grain,” in the precise Benjaminian sense,24 Mani attempts to reinscribe the material life of the colonized woman as subject, as well as transvalue “the traces of active suffering, resistance, and coercion elided or marginalized in these narratives.”25 Convinced, as it were, “that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins,”26 Mani urges her readers not to foreclose too hastily the possibility that the testimonials of women embedded in these eyewitness reports tell us something more and other than the imperial archive would have us believe.

The issue, returning to Spivak’s question, may not be whether the subaltern can speak so much as whether she can be heard to be speaking in a given set of materials and what, indeed, has been made of her voice by colonial and postcolonial historiography. Rephrasing Spivak thus enables us to remain vigilant about the positioning of woman in colonial discourse without conceding to colonial discourse what it did not, in fact, achieve – the erasure of women.27

Whether or not this is a convincing critique of Spivak, of course, is a matter of debate, even as I must confess I agree with Young that Spivak is acutely aware of the intractable problems her critique of historiography presents for feminist studies of colonized worlds, as the following signature words from “Subaltern Studies” bear eloquent witness: “The radical critic in the West is either caught in a deliberate choice of subalternity, granting to the oppressed either that very expressive subjectivity which s/he criticizes, or instead, a total unrepresentability.”28 In Young’s words, “this certainly seems to present an impasse.”29 And yet, according to Gyan Prakash’s assessment of the problem, this “refusal to retrieve the woman’s voice because it would involve the conceit that the interpreter speaks for her does not disable understanding.” On the contrary, he argues, Spivak’s analysis of sati “manages to reinscribe the colonial

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and indigenous patriarchal archive when she shows that the tradition-versus-modernization story was told by obliterating the colonized woman’s subject-position.”30 For Prakash, not only does Spivak’s insistence on the subaltern as absolute limit of historical knowledge not disable understanding, as Mani seems to suggest. It also “enables the critic to mark the space of the silenced subaltern as aporetic.”31 Spivak herself, with her signature brevity, marks this aporetic space like this:

The case of sati as exemplum of woman-in-imperialism would challenge and deconstruct [Michel Foucault’s] opposition between subject (law) and object-of-knowledge (repression), and mark the place of “disappearance” with something other than silence and non-existence, a violent aporia between subject-and object-status.32

Indeed, if this “something other than silence and non-existence” is any indication of the bonds of solidarity motivating Spivak’s work, then her critique of the marginal if not completely absent subject-position of women in the archival sources on widow burning resonates well after all with Mani’s concerns to hear the voices of the burned, however inaudible, however faint. While I do not wish to minimize the differences that exist between them – for example, over the efficacy of writing alternative or “native” histories of the present – what Spivak and Mani undeniably have in common is an abiding feminist concern with the violent inscriptions of women’s bodies in the archives of British imperial rule. The lived realities of women’s bodily specificity in colonized space is thus the constant frame of reference of their interventions in international cultural politics. In the wake of this uncompromising focus of concern, the question becomes not merely who am I (western disciplinary historian or ethnographer?) but who is the other woman?

III To close, if not conclude, this article, I want to shift the discussion from early colonial debates on

sati to the legacy of these and similar debates for the historical present. For it is precisely the violent legacy of western culture and imperialism that haunts some of the most contentious feminist debates of our time, such as the practice of clitoridectomy in certain parts of Africa. In what follows, then, I shall briefly outline what I sense to be at stake in these debates, beginning, not surprisingly, with Spivak herself. With this in mind, I turn to Spivak’s volatile essay, “French Feminism in an International Frame,”33 her devastating critique of Julia Kristeva’s much celebrated but ultimately Eurocentric book, About Chinese Women. Spivak’s essay opens with a rather surprising but highly revealing anecdote. She reports a conversation she had with a “young Sudanese woman in the Faculty of Sociology at a Saudi Arabian University,”34 in which the woman causally describes her recently completed doctoral dissertation: “I have written a structuralist functionalist dissertation on female circumcision in the Sudan.”35 Although willing to forgive the clearly sexist phrase “female circumcision,” Spivak is taken aback by the apparent ease with which the young Sudanese woman uttered the words “structural functionalism,” a school of thought in anthropology and sociology dating back to the work of Durkheim in the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

…Structural Functionalism? Where “integration” is “social control” [which] defines and enforces. . . a degree of solidarity”? Where “interaction, seen from the side of the economy,” is defined as “consist[ing] of the supply of income and wealth applied to purposes strengthening the persistence of cultural patterns? Structural functionalism takes a “disinterested” stance on society as functioning structure. Its implicit interest is to applaud a system – in this case sexual – because it functions.36

After this succinct critique of the “disinterested” posturings of structural functionalism, Spivak

proceeds to quote the Egyptian writer, medical doctor, and social activist Nawal El Saadawi on the material history of clitoridectomy, one which makes it impossible for her to believe that the young Sudanese woman had taken such a methodological approach to the practice:

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In Egypt it is only the clitoris which is amputated, and usually not completely. But in the Sudan, the operation consists in the complete removal of all the external genital organs. They cut off the clitoris, the two major outer lips (labia majora) and the two minor inner lips (labia minora). Then the wound is repaired. The outer opening of the vagina is the only portion left intact, not however without having ensured that, during the process of repairing, some narrowing of the opening is carried out with a few extra stitches. The result is that on the marriage night it is necessary to widen the external opening by slitting one or both ends with a sharp scalpel or razor so that the male organ can be introduced.37

Thus Nawal El Saadawi on the violent bodily inscription that is clitoridectomy, a violence which, as she emphasizes, is directly related to the violence of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa today. For her, clitoridectomy is not an essentially “bizarre African” ritual practice, but one which is implicated in colonial modernity, or what has been called the rise of the West. In relation to Spivak’s anecdote about the Sudanese woman’s dissertation on the “cultural logic” of “female circumcision” in the Sudan, El Saadawi’s analysis makes it possible to describe the practice for what it is – female genital mutilation – even as she stresses the historical implication of colonialism and neocolonialism in the nationalist valorization of clitoridectomy throughout Africa. Asked in a recent interview what should be done about clitoridectomy today, she pointed out the critical need to recognize its historical and political causes, and to acknowledge that African women “have been dealing with it for a long, long time.”38 Rather than “making a sensational fashion out of something that some Western feminists discovered yesterday and will forget tomorrow,”39 what urgently needs to be done today is to recognize the colonial genealogies of female genital mutilation in Africa, while simultaneously condemning the so-called “religious” practice as a crime against women’s bodily specificity and integrity. Just as the spread of widow burning in eastern India at the turn of the nineteenth century cannot easily be separated from the East India Company’s shift from trade to rule, the rise of clitoridectomy as a powerful signifier of nationalist resistance in parts of Africa cannot be separated from what the feminist historian Susan Pederson has called “the sexual politics of colonial policy-making.” Since, as Spivak writes, “the clitoris escapes reproductive framing,”40 it is not difficult to understand why it has been the focus of violent patriarchal appropriation. Nor is it hard to understand why this appropriation – the radical unmaking and reinscription of women’s lives and bodies – has become an allegory of feminist inquiry as such:

All historical and theoretical investigation into the definition of woman as legal object – in or out of marriage; or as politico-economic passageway for property and legitimacy would fall within the investigation of the varieties of the effacement of the clitoris.41

In view of the undeniable fact that “an at least symbolic clitoridectomy has always been the

‘normal’ accession to womanhood and the unacknowledged name of motherhood,”42 perhaps the point to be remembered here alongside Spivak is that the effacement of the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject relates to every socio-political move to control the sexual life of women. This suggests that a feminist practice that attempts to intervene in what Laura Kipnis has called the “world system of patriarchy” crucially depends on persistent, collective efforts to reinscribe the material life of women in a different space of experience. Indeed, given the anti-feminist backlash in international politics today, how could it be otherwise?

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Endnotes

1 See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1990) and Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown,: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988): 66-68. 2 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1988); Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993)”Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120-130; “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” in Sexual Difference, ed. Robert Young, Oxford Literary Review 8 (1986): 225-40; Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985): 243-61. 3 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4 See Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). This book is an expanded version of an earlier essay, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique (Fall, 1987): 199-56. 5 Susan Pederson, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-Making,” The Journal of Modern History 63:4 (December 1991): 647-680. 6 Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique (Fall 1987), p. 199. 7 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 2. 8 As Mani points out, the year 1765 is significant for the study of colonialism in India, for it marks the date that the East India Company completed the move from primarily being traders to becoming de facto rulers. See Contentious Traditions, p. 11. Also see Ashis Nandy, “Sati: A Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence, and Protest,” in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980): 1-31. 9 For an illuminating account of this event, see Ashis Nandy, “Sati in Kalu Yuga: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death,” in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995): 32-52. 10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 297. This essay is a revised version of the essay originally published in Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120-130. I have quoted from both versions in this article. 11 Robert Young, “Spivak: Decolonization, Deconstruction,” in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 164. 12 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak”,” Wedge 7/8 (1985), p. 124. 13 Ibid., p. 124. 14 Ibid., p. 125. 15 Robert Young, “Spivak: Decolonization, Deconstruction,” p. 164. 16 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 207. 17 Ibid., p. 207. 18 See, for example, Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987).

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19 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, p. 159. 20 Ibid., p. 159. 21 Ibid., pp. 159-160. 22 Ibid., p. 159. 23 Ibid., p. 159. 24 See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 25 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 190. 26 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 255. 27 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 190. 28 Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, p. 209. 29 Robert Young, “Spivak: Decolonization, Deconstruction,” p. 165. 30 Gyan Prakash, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” Social Text 31/32 (1992), p. 12. 31 Ibid., p. 12. 32 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Wedge 7/8 (1985), p. 128. 33 Gayatri Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics: 134-153. 34 Ibid., p. 134. 35 Ibid., p. 134. 36 Ibid., p. 134. 37 Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (London: Zed Press, 1980), p. 9. 38 Nawal El Saadawi, “The Bitter Lot of Women: An Interview,” The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 68. 39 Ibid., pp. 68-69. 40 Gayatri Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” p. 151. 41 Ibid., p. 151. 42 Ibid., p. 151.

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Practitioner Interview Beth Olson, Program to Aid Victims of Sexual Assault (PAVSA) Based in Duluth, MN, the College of St. Scholastica sits in a community steeped in history of recognizing and deconstructing patriarchal power. Ellen Pence, of the world famous Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) developed the Power Wheel, used internationally for work in domestic abuse and violence against women. Feminist Forum aims to connect theory to practice in the city that boasts the nation’s first Building for Women. Duluth’s Building for Women houses the Program to Aid Victims of Sexual Assault (PAVSA); we are honored to engage with PAVSA’s Program Coordinator for the following Practitioner Interview. FF: What are the most crucial issues facing your work in sexual assault today? BO: I think one issue that has been emerging over the last decade is whether or not sexual assault should be viewed and classified as a public health issue. If sexual assault becomes viewed as a public health issue we will have new analysis as to how and why sexual assault occurs and how to approach ending this violence. This analysis would look at how to best “prevent” sexual assault. Although we need to be discussing how best to prevent sex offenders from becoming just that, my concern is that the focus of this prevention will be on the sexual assault victims or potential victims. The education that is conducted in public health campaigns may only focus on mass education in the form of media, billboards and brochures. This type of education is appropriate to serve as a reminder for issues or concerns that people already understand or to introduce people to a simple idea like washing your hands to prevent the spread of germs. We don’t attempt to prevent murder in these ways. Sexual assault is a crime. Sexual offenders are a very specialized type of criminal. There has been a significant amount of feminist analysis and offender analysis done over the last 30 years that seems would be a more appropriate perspective from which to form our communities’ response to prevention and intervention of sexual assault. The draw to classifying sexual assault as a public health issue is that invariably there will be additional money and resources devoted by the federal and state health departments to sexual assault. These resources may or may not trickle down to sexual assault programs who work with people affected by sexual violence every day and often also provide the education and awareness to the communities they serve. There has not been a priority in regards to lending resources to the issue of sexual assault at any time in history. I think the push to address sexual assault in the public health arena is a way for out-state and federal entities to say they are acknowledging and doing something about this very important problem, but not actually have to address an effective solution because that costs money. People will feel like their government is addressing the issue, but what will we see for results? I believe it is important that the state and federal government as well as our communities look to the sexual assault advocates and the victims of these crimes to find the answers to how to prevent and intervene in the most effective manner. The feminist analysis that sexual assault is used as a tool of oppression specifically of women and certain men who do not fall in line with male gender roles is still important. Sexual assault programs have expertise that can be tapped. If resources are provided to these agencies, I believe we will see great change. FF: How could this attention as a public health issue be helpful to the movement?

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BO: If the money is given to local communities for education, it can be helpful. When local communities can work together to develop educational practices specific to their communities’ resources and needs we will be more effective. Changes can be made locally so that victims are supported and treated respectfully, more cases are prosecuted and more offenders are held accountable. We need to develop education in our communities that the people there are able to relate to and will be effective in eliciting a response. It’s better for me and the police chief to sit down and strategize than to try to use a 30-second PSA. That kind of advertisement is best suited for reminding us of what we already know – not to introduce complex ideas. There are a lot of people who know a lot about sexual assault and they need to lead this effort. Assigning leadership to people educated in community health may not be the most effective and way of addressing this problem. FF: What growth has the sexual assault movement experienced? BO: This movement is young. Although there have been numerous anti-rape initiatives throughout history, the establishment of rape crisis centers and a more formalized movement has been “moving” since the early 1970’s, largely as a result of consciousness raising groups. PAVSA began in 1975 and became an official organization in 19786, so we were at the cutting edge of the movement in Duluth. I would like to acknowledge the work of so many women who stood up and spoke out about rape at different points in history. African-American women were at the forefront of this movement in the 1800’s. A group of women testified before congress in 1886 after the Memphis riots where a number of black women were gang raped by a white mob. In the 1870’s groups of African American women formed to confront violence – including lynching and rape. Of course these are only a few examples of all the work that had been done prior to the 1970’s. In the 1970’s the original focus of this movement was rape. Groups were formed to support survivors, challenge the legal system in its response to sexual assault, and educate. However, the issues of sexual assault grew more complex as people began sharing their experiences of child sexual abuse, incest, sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence. In the 1980’s, there was a large emphasis placed on adult survivors of child sexual abuse, counseling, support groups and civil court cases. This resulted in a reduced focus on the legal system and an increased focus on education, counseling and support groups. This tide is shifting as we are focusing more on legal issues and the criminal justice system. This approach is more much holistic. We are seeing opportunities and changes on the horizon. For example, the funding allocated through the Violence Against Women Act has primarily focused on legal issues related to domestic violence and now in the last year is also putting a more direct focus on legal issues in cases of sexual violence. FF: What struggles do you face as an organization working in this movement? BO: Funding. We’ve received the same amount of funding through Crime Victim Services at the state level for over ten years. The price of postage has increased, mileage has gone up, salaries have increased, health care has skyrocketed and there are huge internal expenses for technology, DSL, and the internet. This crime victim funding that is available to support the most basic of our programs is not even a quarter of out budget. In order to properly address the issue, it needs to become more of a priority in the state and the country. The government needs to recognize that costs for victim assistance have increased. FF: What is the role of higher education role in addressing the rape culture? BO: I believe colleges and universities have a huge responsibility regarding sexual assault education, intervention and response. They need to have appropriate ways to respond on campus, appropriate processes, including protocols that are victim-centered and friendly to reports of sexual assault. We still see places erring on the side of the perpetrator. Excuses of “He won’t do it again,” or “That person who

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reported may be lying,” indicate an institutional fear of the perpetrator. There is a fear that the perpetrator will sue the institution if expelled or prosecuted. Victims blame themselves and society blames them too. It takes strong policies and effective procedures to respond to cases of sexual violence so that the institution does not fall into playing out myths and stereotypes. Institutions are not recognizing the importance of the issue and why they should pay particular attention to it. If women are assaulted and do not report because of a non-supportive environment or do not receive a favorable response from administration, they leave. Women leave all the time – they transfer or drop out. They don’t want to stay and run into that person in the hallways, especially in small schools where it’s hard to avoid somebody. Women make up half of college population. Retention committees should concern themselves with issues of sexual assault. For the system to work at schools, we need buy-in from the top, otherwise there is no accountability and education, policies, and procedures will not be effective. FF: How can society, at-large, work to change the rape culture? BO: Sexual assault is infuriating. It makes you angry because of what it does to women. Sexual assault keeps a whole population unable to fully participate in life or have true liberty and freedom. Sexual assault programs sometimes forget they started as feminist organizations. Many started as feminist cooperatives, whether they still are or not. They are grounded in the principles of feminism. We, at PAVSA, have feminist theory-based counseling, support groups and even administration of structure. We use the methodology of feminist community organizing. To pull it out feels like death to these organizations. Pulling out feminism leaves them to become much less effective. I hope people, both women and men, will consider joining this movement. Working on behalf of sexual assault victims is often characterized as awful, depressing and morbid, but this is really great work. This is important work, because we’re part of a movement to make a better world for everyone and to help people at a very traumatic time in their lives. Students who are interested in making change in the world can get involved. Being a sexual assault advocate is about helping people AND making changes to the conditions they experience.

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1200 Kenwood AvenueDuluth, MN 55811

(218) 723-7029feministforum@css.edu