UH Hilo Women’s Studies program celebrates 25 years and the start of new baccalaureate degree
This academic year, the WS certificate program has been transformed into a baccalaureate in Gender and Women’s Studies.
By Lara Hughes and Susan Enright with photos by Claudia Hagan for UH Hilo Stories.
An event to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the women’s studies program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo was held earlier this month. Four pioneers of the certificate program were honored at the event — retirees Sonia Juvik, Kenny Simmons and Sandra Wagner-Wright, and colleague Susan Brown who is still at the university.
Each spoke at the event along with the women now at the helm of the program, taking the audience on a tour through the years of ideas, processes and people that led to the present platform, a baccalaureate in gender and women’s studies.
The herstory of Hilo’s women’s studies program
Simmons, a retired English professor who also served as an administrator at different times during her career at UH Hilo, arrived at the university in 1979 to teach modern literature and film. At that time there were very few women on the faculty.
But that first course she taught — women in modern literature (ENG355), created around 1980 — didn’t become “feminist” for several years. Simmons says her feminist criticism grew out of what she was reading to plan the course. Notably, an essay by feminist critic Elaine Hedges at The Feminist Press, and an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision,” which is a foundation essay about women readers and the role of the feminist critic.
“This material set me on the path to being a full-on feminist literary critic and to turning Women in Modern Literature into an introduction to feminist criticism,” Simmons says.
In those early years, any courses at UH Hilo related to women’s studies such as Simmons’s were simply listed in their own departments.
But in 1988, historian Wagner-Wright arrived at UH Hilo. By then, courses including and centering on women’s contributions to research, history, the arts, the sciences, etcetera, were popping up more and more throughout disciplines, and Wagner-Wright proposed making women’s studies into a comprehensive program.
“That was the brilliance of Sandra’s idea,” says Simmons. “When she created the women’s studies certificate program, courses were then listed in their own discipline and also as WS. The very best part of that process was the creation of cross listed courses. So my course showed up not only in the English course listings, but also under women’s studies, and my students started to come from all over the university.”
Bucking institutional norms, the founders of the new women’s studies program established the first steering committee on campus, and instead of a chair, Wagner-Wright became the first facilitator. “We didn’t want to be like everybody else,” she explains.
The concept worked.
In addition to English and history, cross listings increased to more than a dozen departments including anthropology, communications, geography, Japanese studies, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, and more. In the program’s 25 years, over 40 faculty have taught courses across disciplines, and over 130 students have graduated with certificates, majors or minors.
New baccalaureate program in gender and women’s studies
Last spring, the UH System Board of Regents approved the transformation of the women’s studies certificate program into a gender and women’s studies baccalaureate program. Since the fall 2015 semester, students have the option to major or minor in the program. The first students to earn official majors and minors graduated in December 2015, and several more will graduate this May.
According to the program’s website, the gender and women’s studies program at UH Hilo promotes an interdisciplinary understanding of how race, class, sexuality, nation and other elements of diversity intersect with the study of women and categories of gender.
The program proposal says the name change — from women’s studies to gender and women’s studies — recognizes that gender is a social and cultural category that encompasses a wide spectrum of identity and behavior including heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex issues.
Professor Juvik, a retired geographer and another founder and facilitator of the women’s studies program, spoke at the event about the seriousness the faculty have always striven for and the rigor they have had over the years in improving and managing the program.
“Today is a great day because the degree program in gender studies is an idea whose time has come,” says Juvik. “You are the ones who must nourish and nurture all of the good ideas that come forward.”
The current cohort of university faculty now managing and teaching in the program includes Amy Gregg, who taught her first course at UH Hilo on women and religion 20 years ago. She was a lecturer when she took the helm as the women’s studies facilitator in 2004. She now teaches as an instructor and serves as an advisor to students in the gender and women’s studies program.
Gregg says, “Having meaningful work was always really important to me and I really found that in teaching women’s studies. I think that the support and empowerment in this program are key, not only for our students, but also for our faculty.”
Gregg says that around 2005, students started expressing strong interest in majoring in women’s studies. At that time, the only option to do so was to create an individualized program of study through the liberal studies program. Over the next 10 years, Gregg advised a dozen students who pursued a women’s studies major in this way.
“This trend contributed to making a strong case for the new official major,” she says.
Marilyn Brown, chair and associate professor of sociology, became involved after the program had begun its evolution into a degree program. As facilitator from 2011-2014, she guided the major proposal through the lengthy approval process.
Brown claims she didn’t see herself as someone who led the charge, but rather as someone who brought people together.
She says, “I would like to see (the program) become a platform… for real organizational culture change.”
Celia Bardwell-Jones, an associate professor of philosophy and current chair of the gender and women’s studies program, was the first woman to be hired in the philosophy department at UH Hilo. She is the first chair, rather than facilitator, of the new program.
Of her experience continuing the work of the founders of the gender and women’s studies program, she says, “I feel like this was the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done in my own career, appearing before the Board of Regents to defend the gender and women’s studies major proposal.”
Bardwell-Jones notes the support the group received from UH Hilo Chancellor Don Straney, and the desire of the program’s faculty to continue putting in the work needed to make the degree program a success in the coming years.
Story by Lara Hughes, a junior at UH Hilo majoring in business administration; she is a public information intern in the Office of the Chancellor. Contributor Susan Enright is a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories; she received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo. Amy Gregg and Kenny Simmons also contributed.
Photos by Claudia Hagan, a part-time student at UH Hilo serving as photographer for the Office of the Chancellor. She hails from Argentina and is a natural light portrait photographer based on Hawaiʻi Island.
