Transitions Magazine - Fall 2012 - Prescott College

Women’s Studies at Prescott College:
The Beginnings
By Lisa Stewart Garrison ’75
By the late 1960s and early 70s, as feminism swept the
country, dramatically changing what women expected
of themselves and each other, the seeds of the women’s
movement were taking root at Prescott College. With its slogan
“the personal is political,” feminism was primarily impacting urban
centers. Few would have predicted that young women at a secluded
college campus in the chaparral country of the Granite Dells of
Central Arizona might be emboldened to develop courses of study
and ways of living and talking together that would contribute to the
broader movement and transform the lives of those of us involved.
In many ways, fertile ground for women’s empowerment was
in place by 1968 when Prescott College formally launched its
signature three-week Wilderness Orientation Program. The first
cadre of young women participated in intensive hiking, kayaking,
river rafting, and mountaineering; faced physical challenges, took
risks, and engaged in cooperative teamwork, gaining newfound
confidence in their strength and problem solving abilities. Three
days spent alone in the wilderness nurtured qualities of self-reliance
and a sense of spiritual connection with nature.
Yet as classes formally began, women
students quickly learned that experiencing
competence in wilderness settings and
knowing how and when to use words to
confront sexism were very different things.
At Prescott College, in that era, men greatly
outnumbered women on the faculty and in the
syllabi. Out of a faculty of 37, only three were
women. As women students we embraced
Prescott’s philosophy of taking individual
responsibility for directing one’s own education.
We were learning to read maps and to
map out our lives. But we were also searching
for role models and determined to find faculty
on campus to help us articulate our insights.
Prescott College’s first women’s
consciousness raising group met at the
school’s newly opened Center for the
Person on October 19, 1970. We found
our faculty mentor in Heather Keen
(now Heather Starsong), who had
arrived on campus to teach modern
dance and establish ayoga program.
A group of 12 to 15 of us met weekly,
throughout the year, verbalizing
feelings and perceptions previously
left unsaid, grappling with our increasing
anger, and finding our common
ground as women.
Although at first reluctant to serve in an advisory capacity,
Heather stepped in, on condition that we accept her as a fellow
learner, since she didn’t claim this issue to be within her area of
expertise. Feminism was focusing on women and their bodies at
that time, but the emphasis was on reproductive rights, access to
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Transitions Fall 2014
healthcare, sexuality, and self-defense. Heather’s commitment to
embodiment through improvisational dance and the inward
journey set a distinctive tone for our explorations. She invited
special guests to meet with us, such as the ritual and ceremony
maker Elizabeth Cogburn. Heather’s grounded presence in a
turbulent time of intense social awakening demonstrated for us
what it is to be an emotionally courageous woman.
The provocative influence of feminist theory and the
intellectual firepower of
Peggy Rourke and Sarah White, 1972, by Beliz Brother
confrontation were alive
and well among women
at Prescott College in
the early 1970s. A feminist
critique of the
Orientation Program
began to emerge. Give
us experiences that lead
us out of our comfort
zone, by all means. But
Outward Bound’s creed
then—“To Strive, To
Seek, To Find, and Not
To Yield” (Alfred Lord Tennyson)—
evoked a summit mentality, a push for
the peak, and an unwillingness to surrender
that was increasingly discomfiting
to women.
A group of us set up a feminist
dorm. Hot-off-the-press feminist
manifestos, forwarded to us by my
sister in California, were coveted like
contraband. Dog-eared copies of the
women’s newspaper Off Our Backs were
passed from room to room. We were
yearning to read literature by women
and to find heroines whose journeys
might inspire our own.
In the fall of 1971 fellow women students approached me to
teach the College’s first women’s literature class. We organized
ourselves as an Independent Study with Heather Keen and
literature professor Dr. Stan Witt serving as faculty advisors. By
the following spring, 25 women were enrolled.
We supplemented a syllabus of novels by women with
readings of feminist theory and criticism, acquired through
pilgrimages to bookstores in Phoenix and Berkeley. We were
making our way through the writings of Shulamith Firestone, Kate
Millet, and Robin Morgan. The poetry books of Sylvia Plath, Anne
Sexton, and Judy Grahn were on perpetual reserve for us in the
library. Throughout the spring of 1972, we met each Monday
evening in an old grey farmhouse off campus (then home to a
group of Prescott students and their small herd of goats).
Inspired by our readings, our conversations ranged from
women’s changing identities, to women loving women, and
Women’s
Literature at
Prescott College was my
entry point to everything. What
we read and talked about, where
we met, who we understood
ourselves to be, opened the door
to what I would study, whom I
would love, how I would live
and work.
—Melanie Lohmann ’75
Lisa S. Garrison, 1972