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Forty years ago, an intrepid group of professors
and students paved the way for a new program
dedicated to the study of gender – and sparked
progress for women across the university
by margaret webb
IT STARTED WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION.
In the 1960s, Jill Ker Conway, who went on to co-found
one of the first women’s studies courses at U of T, wondered
why women, who’d had access to education for more than
130 years in North America, had “so little to show for it in
terms of roles in the professions, politics and the academy.”
The question inspired Conway’s Harvard doctoral thesis.
In 1970 at U of T, activists in the women’s liberation
movement took that same concern to a meeting of the new
Interdisciplinary Studies Department: Why were women still
largely absent from curriculum and textbooks and barely
present in faculty ranks 85 long years after the first female
students graduated from the university The activists suggested
a women’s course would help remedy the situation.
Remarkably, two such courses would appear on the
academic calendar the following year, and attract full enrolment.
In fact, the courses were so successful that they led
to the founding of what has become Canada’s oldest and
most prestigious women’s studies program – celebrating its
40 th anniversary this fall. The courses also asserted gender
equality as a key value at U of T.
But it didn’t happen without a fight.
Women’s studies grew out of the great “ferment” on campuses
in the late ’60s, recalls Professor Natalie Zemon Davis,
PHOTO: REG INNELL/GETSTOCK.COM summer 2012 33