The 1970s

The 1970s

Volume 43, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2015
Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

The 1970s was a foundational decade for women’s studies. In the first issue of the Women’s Studies Newsletter, published in the fall of 1972, Florence Howe surveyed the burgeoning field, writing, “Two years ago … there were two women’s studies programs at Cornell and at San Diego. There are now, as of yesterday’s mail, 46 programs, most of which are located up and down the west coast; in New Mexico and Arizona; north of Maryland on the east coast and as far west as Buffalo and Pittsburgh” (Howe 1972, 2).¹ “Yesterday’s mail” would have been delivered to the Feminist Press, which Howe had founded in 1970 and which continues today as one of the oldest feminist publishers in the world.² Howe, who would later describe herself as “the historian and record keeper of women’s studies,” was uniquely qualified to receive “yesterday’s mail” and to comment on the state of the field under construction (2011, 265). She had been tracking personnel and curricula associated with women’s studies (a.k.a. “female” studies) since 1969, both as the administrator of the Clearinghouse on Women’s Studies and as chair of the Modern Language Association’s Commission on the Status and Education of Women. In her introduction to the first installment of Who’s Who and Where in Women’s Studies, published by the Feminist Press in 1974, Howe wrote, “In scope and in the rapidity of its extension across the country, it would be difficult to find an historical parallel to ‘women’s studies’” (1974, VI). That unparalleled expansion needed good record keepers, to be sure. But as A Life in Motion, Howe’s memoir and personal history of the Feminist Press, beautifully demonstrates, keeping track of women’s studies required a lot of hustle. Women’s studies was moving faster than the post.