Transitions Magazine - Fall 2012 - Prescott College

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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 8 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
conflicts between conventional gender and sex prescriptions and unconventional lives. Ardent discussions of books were interspersed with poetry readings, dance, songs from the newly emerging genre of women’s music, and meditations on visual art. Beliz Brother ’72 shared with us a slide show she created about the artist Georgia O’ Keeffe, whose paintings played with scale and abstracted from nature to produce a distinctively female iconography. At an all-night meeting dedicated primarily to discussions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, we viewed clips of a baby being delivered in an ambulance from a film borrowed from the Yavapai County Sheriff ’s Office. In those days before Lamaze had gained national prominence, it was the first time any of us had witnessed a woman giving birth. Central to feminism, as we understood it nearly 45 years ago, was a vision of a world in which every mother could count on having adequate childcare and all children had the right to an education devoid of gender stereotyping and cultural bias. In the summer of 1971 a group of Prescott students and community members founded the Funny School at Groom Creek, a program that provided a socially conscious, multicultural, and non-sexist environment for children. The Funny School served as a precursor to the Primavera School, which opened in 1972 on ten acres in Copper Basin, with six students and the involvement of many Prescott College volunteers. Prescott alumna Becky Ruffner ’75 would spend the next decade developing Primavera into a stellar example of progressive education and the first accredited early childhood program in Yavapai County. The intimacy of our time, meeting together at Grey Farm, talking about books, forming friendships, experiencing what it might be to live an activist life, sensing ourselves as part of a “women’s culture” and a global women’s movement, would have a seminal influence on how we moved into the next phases of our lives. Yet each of us took different things from the experience. Melanie Lohmann ’75 would concentrate on studies of women’s literature and creative writing throughout her undergraduate experience at Prescott College, eventually completing advanced studies at the Women’s Writers Center in Cazenovia, New York. Peggy Rourke (Gavillot) ’74 followed her studies at the University of Chicago with travels in Africa and the Middle East. She lived for well over a decade on an island off the coast of Madagascar before returning to Arizona to teach. Sarah White ’74 saw feminism as a framework for understanding social dynamics. She would eventually explore feminist socialism, participate in women’s apprenticeship programs, join a union, and culminate her career in the Engineering Division of the King County Department of Wastewater in Seattle. Artist Beliz Brother credits her studies of women artists while at Prescott with making her unafraid to undertake large-scale public art works or be the only woman working in a given field. Beliz’s monumental works can now be found in the Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley, at Seahawks Football Stadium “Farmhouse gals,” Grey Farm, 1972, by Beliz Brother Transitions Fall 2014 9
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Transitions Magazine - Fall 2012 - Prescott College

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