USC’s women’s and gender program, all grown up and even more relevant

In the fall of 1974, 13 USC students, mostly young women, began traversing unfamiliar, heady and sometimes perilous terrain as they immersed themselves in the university’s inaugural course on women’s studies.

The class aimed to encourage students “not only to consider the image of women, but to see the world through women’s eyes.”

Kevin Lewis, a professor of religious studies, volunteered to add the Women in Western Culture course to his regular teaching load, as did two others, art professor Beverly Heisner and English professor Karen Rood.

“We thought it was high time to be breaking new ground,” Lewis recalled last week. “We weren’t tiptoeing – we were doing what we thought needed to be done.”

Since then, Lewis has been a huge supporter of the program as has his wife, Becky Lewis, who earned a graduate women’s studies certificate in 1994. Studying famous feminist writers and learning about the struggles of women “represented a heady and liberating time for me,” Becky Lewis wrote in a reflection.

And so for the many young women - and young men - who followed.

Beth Padgett remembered the class as an exhilarating, challenging endeavor.

“We were very much aware we were doing something rare and unusual and maybe a little bit radical,” said Padgett, editorial page editor at The Greenville News. “Fortunately, it’s hard to set the reset button, but women were just beginning to get started in journalism, to venture into law school and medical school. It really was a different world.”

Considering women’s lives and inequality

Now, 40 years after that 1974-75 academic year, that class has evolved into a full-fledged interdisciplinary program with eight full-time faculty and 120 affiliate professors across disciplines such as medicine, public health, politics and religion. The program offers a bachelor of arts degree in women’s and gender studies and a graduate certificate.

The original mandate – to consider women’s social, economic and political lives – has expanded to include gender studies, a component added in 2008. And the program has blossomed to embrace the Midlands community through internships in areas of public health, criminal justice and social justice, said program director Ed Madden.

That endurance and community reach will be celebrated at a 40th anniversary gala Tuesday. There, three “social justice luminaries” – Harriet Hancock, Marjorie Hammock and Sarah Leverette – will be recognized for the public service work they have done.

Of those original questions concerning women’s social, economic and political equality, “I don’t think all those questions have gone away,” Madden said this week.

“Look at the representation of women in our political system. Look at the statistics on domestic violence. We are still number 2” in the country in the numbers of women murdered by their spouses or domestic partners.

And don’t get Madden started on S.C. Sen. Tom Corbin, the Greenville lawmaker who made a joke about women being “a lesser cut of meat.”

The Republican was called out on the remark by the Senate’s lone female, Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, but the fact that it was uttered in public still astounds Madden and others who have championed a better place for women in society.

“The fact that that can happen – it says something about the culture, but it says something about the importance of having women in politics,” he said.

Last year, the state legislature erupted over funding USC Upstate’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, and some lawmakers questioned academic institutions that assigned books with gay and lesbian themes.

That makes the USC program, which has grown to emphasize not only women’s issues but gender issues at the intersection of race, social class, religion and sexual orientation, all the more relevant, Madden said.

“It’s life-shaping, it’s a fundamental shift in how we live in the world,” he said of the ideas that have driven the program. “That sounds really, really grand, but I think its true.”

Foot soldiers in the women’s movement

The women’s movement was in full flourish in the early decades of the women’s studies program. Feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan urged women to break out of domestic routines and low-paying clerical jobs and fight for equality.

Women mobilized for passage of an Equal Rights Amendment and rallied against exploitation and domestic violence.

That was great fodder for a class that was exploring the roles of women in western art and literature, from the Old Testament and Greek and Roman mythology to modern fiction.

Retired USC English professor Sally Boyd taught a section of the course from 1980 through 2012. She relished the awakening in the classroom as students learned about early female activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells and read classics such as Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

Sometimes Boyd illustrated inequity with her personal experience, recalling for her students that she could not obtain a loan in the 1970s without her husband’s signature.

“In every single class I taught there were students who had incredible 'Aha!’ moments in what they learned about what went on in this country,” Boyd said.

“I really tried to make the course a combination to expose students to philosophy and theory they had not thought about, and then to provide a summary of the women's movement.”

The University of South Carolina wasn’t a hotbed of radical feminism back in the day, nor would it be described that way today. But students were open to new ideas, Lewis, the religion professor who launched that first class, recalled.

“I think they (the students) knew they were on new ground and didn't know what to expect and were waiting to see how we were guiding them,” he said. “We were just starting something new because we believed in it.”

This story was originally published March 20, 2015 at 11:33 PM with the headline "USC’s women’s and gender program, all grown up and even more relevant."