History of Department
Simon Fraser University was the first university in Canada to develop a credit Women's Studies Program.
- 1971 ~ the first credit course, the Geography of Gender, was offered.
- July 1975 ~ the proposal for a Women's Studies Minor Program was approved by the University Senate.
- January 1976 ~ the first Women's Studies course was offered. Forty students enrolled in WS 101, Introduction to Women's Studies.
- By 1999-2000, almost 650 students were enrolled in over 40 Women's Studies courses.
- 2004 - the first PhD students were admitted into the program.
- The department now has a number of undergraduate programs including a major and also offers an MA program and a PhD program.
- December 2009 - SFU Senate officially approved department name change to Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
Women's Studies at SFU has had a significant impact on women in British Columbia and has acquired a national reputation. Despite the world being far from ideal for women or Women's Studies, the SFU program continues to evolve while keeping its focus on informing, involving, and empowering women. The Department aspires to build networks with feminists and activists from the South to organize against social and economic exploitation of women globally.
There are four full-time faculty members, four faculty who are jointly appointed with another department, eight faculty from other departments who serve as associate members of the department, one endowed professor and three staff members employed by the department.
Histories of Women’s Studies at SFU: Two Versions
Meredith Kimball
I gave the following talk at the Women’s Studies Visioning Workshop in April 2008. My goals were to share both the public history of the establishment and growth of Women’s Studies at SFU and the less public history of the struggle behind this growth. In order to do this I began with the assumption that histories are always multiple, and depend not only on the evidence available, but also on the location of the person doing the telling and the time and purpose of the telling. Thus, I chose for this time and place to reflect on two versions of the history of our department: 1) a progressive story of growth and accomplishment; and 2) a story of ongoing struggle.
Both WS external review study documents (1995 and 2002) begin with a summary of the progressive story: “The history of the Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser University can be best characterized as one of steady growth with a continuing emphasis on excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service.” I begin by describing this story of success and accomplishment. In the late 1960s the Women’s Caucus grew out of left wing politics at SFU. The caucus had four active workshops, one of which focused on Education or the ‘ed wing’ as Andrea Lebowitz and Maggie Benston called it. As a part of their work, they and others were interested in developing Women’s Studies at SFU. In the early 1970s existing courses in Geography and Canadian Studies were the first courses offered with a focus on women. Student support for these courses was strong and a group of students including Kate Braid, who in 2006-2007 was the Ruth Wynn Woodward Professor, went to the then Dean of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies, Bob Brown, demanding a full Women’s Studies program. He sent them to Andrea and Maggie and together they went about setting up a committee to develop a Women’s Studies program. This committee included students, staff, and faculty with as many as 20 people attending the meetings. By 1973 the committee had developed a proposal for a stand-alone Women’s Studies Program which offered a minor. During the next two years Andrea and Maggie took to the proposal through 11 university committees, culminating with the full Senate meeting in July 1975 (Lebowitz, Newcombe & Kimball, in press). The first WS course was offered in January 1976 and enrolled 40 students.
The 1980s saw two important developments in WS. The first was the initiation of the MA program. Because of limited resources, we decided to move to the establishment of an MA program before developing a major. Work on the MA proposal began in 1981 and the first students entered the MA in January 1985. The second important initiation was the establishment of the Ruth Wynn Woodward endowed chair (RWWP). In 1985 SFU received one of the five $500,000 grants from the Women’s Program, Secretary of State to establish an endowed chair in WS. In the fall of 1985 the first appointment to the endowed chair was made and by 1987 the RWWP became the first fully funded endowed chair at SFU.
In the 1990s two important initiatives were accomplished. First, was the expansion of the undergraduate offerings. We began to prepare for offering a major by introducing two joint majors, English in 1991 and Psychology in 1992. Several curriculum changes that supported a major were put in place and a proposal for a WS major passed Senate in December 1994. Further joint majors were added in 1997 (Political Science and Sociology/Anthropology) and in 2001 (Criminology, History, and Humanities). Second was the change in status for WS from program to department which Senate approved in October 1991. Although this change did not result in any change in the day to day functioning of faculty and staff, it was highly significant symbolically.
In the current decade, the most significant development has been the introduction of a PhD program. Work on the proposal began in 2000 and the first students were admitted in 2004. Another addition to the graduate program was the course-based MA introduced in 2000. Undergraduate offerings were expanded with the addition of the Gender Studies minor in September 2004.
Since the 1970s WS at SFU has come a very long way. The program was launched with two jointly-appointed faculty. Now there are three jointly-appointed and six full-time faculty. Staff positions have grown from one part-time position to two full-time and one half-time positions. Originally there were two or three scattered offices. Now there is an identifiable (if inadequate) WS space. The first WS course enrolled 40 students. In 2007-2008 there were 775 students enrolled in our various undergraduate programs and courses and 23 MA and PhD students.
In contrast to this story of progress, my second story is one of ongoing struggle. I want to focus here on three themes: 1) operating against the grain; 2) losses; and 3) conflicts. As a part of a university, we have had to work within an institution with goals and structures that frequently differ from the feminist goals and strategies that we hold. Two specific ways in which we have had to operate against the grain are a) the misogyny of many individuals in the university; and b) the increasingly centralized control of departmental operating procedures. There have always been misogynist individuals in the university. In the 1970s, when WS was founded, a number were very vocal in their views. Andrea Lebowitz remembers only too well the Senate meeting of July 7, 1975 when the original program for a WS minor went forward. As she remembers it, that night there was a rare but violent thunder storm raging outside that was matched by the verbal storm in the Senate chambers. Interestingly, and I think typically, it was a few people who expressed most of the opposition and when the vote finally came after hours of debate, the proposal passed easily (Lebowitz, Newcome, & Kimball, in press). Most of us who have defended WS proposals in front of university committees can tell similar stories. There has been progress. More people are sympathetic and people with misogynist views are less willing to express them openly. However, some remain who are public with their views. When Sue Wendell took the WS PhD proposal to the Faculty of Arts Graduate Committee early in this decade, there was one member who ranted on against our proposal for a very long time in a most insulting and hostile way. Times had changed and a number of other committee members expressed their outrage at his behaviour to Sue after the meeting. But it remains that this can happen to any one associated with WS at any time on any university committee. Within this hostile environment, supportive individuals, sometimes men, sometimes feminist women have been crucial supports. When the WS proposal was going through those 11 committees, Pauline Jewett was President of SFU and she made it publicly known that she wanted WS at SFU. We probably would still have won that Senate vote without her in the chair, but it sure helped. In a later round, I was present at Senate when a new WS course was on the agenda. Pauline managed to curb the very hostile debate fueled by a vocal few who were eager to speak multiple times, by invoking a rule available to the chair that only people who had not spoken previously would be recognized. An extended silence followed, then one or two people spoke in favour of the motion, a vote was taken and it passed easily. When WS received $500,000 for an endowed chair in 1985, it came with the condition that we raise a further $500,000 to fully endow the chair. None of us knew the first thing about raising that kind of money. But we were lucky in that another feminist, Joy Leach, was at that time Director of Development at SFU. She took our proposal on and found and negotiated with the Woodward sisters that they would contribute $400,000 in exchange for naming the chair in honour of their mother. The rest came easily after that and thus the RWWP was the first fully endowed chair at SFU. At the celebration of the Woodward sisters’ donation, a senior administrator told me that if it had been up to him this certainly would not have been the first endowed chair at SFU.
Since the 1970s the university bureaucracy has increasingly controlled departmental operations. This has affected all
departments through increased workload and greater bureaucratic demands, but for WS it has also meant moving away from earlier procedures that emphasized communal decision making. WS began with a constitution that gave a vote to all faculty, sessionals, student representatives, and staff on all important matters including faculty searches. Only promotion and tenure decisions for faculty were regulated by university-wide procedures. The last time I was chair of the department (1999-2003) rules had tightened, but I could and did get approval from the Dean’s office for establishing search committees as committees of the whole. Clearly this is no longer possible, as the university now defines not only who can vote on such decisions, but also what those eligible must do (attend colloquia, etc) in order to be eligible to vote.
In addition to our successes we have also had many losses. When we first proposed a WS program, we did so within the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies or FIDS as it was called. The Dean, Bob Brown, was very supportive of the program and the faculty provided a structure within which it was natural to set up a stand-alone program. In the severe budget cuts during the recession of the early 1980s, FIDS was cut. All the individual programs within the faculty went to other faculties, so very little money was actually saved as is typical of many visible cuts. At the time, I thought this a loss for interdisciplinarity at SFU, but did not experience it as an immediate loss for WS as we moved to a supportive Arts faculty. However, in the long run, I see this as a major loss. Within FIDS, WS was a largish fish in a relatively small pond, in Arts and Social Sciences it is a very small fish in a very large pond. In terms of resources and support for research and teaching, the loss of a faculty devoted to interdiplinarity has been a big loss.
There have been many smaller losses as well. Often joint appointments were not filled due to disagreements with the other department. In 1992, a joint appointment had been offered to a candidate and we were finalizing which department would be her home department, when the university cut all unfilled positions. Fortunately the candidate had another offer and was not left without a job, but I still feel sick when I remember this and it was 16 years ago.
The university encourages individuality over team work. In addition there are always limited, or in times of cutbacks, decreasing resources. Together these generate conflicts, or as Sue Wendell expressed it to me recently “The university is a harsh place”. Having a joint appointment, I certainly experienced as many or more conflicts in Psychology as in WS, but the WS ones were more intense, and at times more painful because I always cared more for WS. Differences among us in feminisms and political strategies have always been part of the department’s culture and have often led to disagreements and conflicts amongst ourselves. Conflicts between what individuals would choose to do and what the university requires of its employees range from minor to severe. I remember the strike of the late 1970s when sessionals and TAs went out. As Coordinator of WS I was told by my Dean that I was expected to cross the picket line which I did. In the 1990s we had some very serious conflicts between students and sessional instructors about racism that left all parties feeling victimized and very wounded. Almost every hiring decision I have been a part of in both my departments has been conflictful at some point. And for joint appointments, these conflicts have also included differences of opinion between departments. I’ve always thought appointments were especially fraught because everyone cares very much about who becomes a colleague and how hiring affects the direction of the department.
As my progressive history shows, WS at SFU is a great program that has provided a place for students and faculty to create and share knowledge that can and does change women’s lives. However, none of these accomplishments has been easy. Differences amongst ourselves and with the wider university have been sources of conflicts. We have had failures as well as successes. There have always been hard times, including from time to time, severe budget cuts. Much as one would like to hope the future will be different, I doubt it. In spite of all of this, WS has grown in into one of the best departments in the university and one of the best WS programs in Canada. We all should be proud of what has been accomplished. Since I retired in 2004 I have not participated in the day-to-day life of this department, but I continue to watch with sympathy the ongoing struggles and look forward to future accomplishments. I’ve always believed in and had faith in this department. I still do.
Reference:
Lebowitz, A., Newcombe, H., and Kimball, M.M. (in press). Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, 1965-1976: A Dialogue. In M. Eichler, M Luxton, W. Robbins, & F. Descarries (Eds.), Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies in Canada: 1965-1976. Wilfred Laurier Press: Kitchener, ON.