Women’s Studies in NYU SEHNAP
New York University School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (SEHNAP) / 1979
NYU's School of Education is currently known as the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, but from 1974 to 1994 it was known as SEHNAP, School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions. My introduction to WGS programming at NYU SEHNAP came after I requested some files from the administrative papers of Daniel E. Griffiths, dean of SEHNAP from 1965-1983. Griffiths’ archival materials span 160 linear feet, but I only needed two folders: Commission on Women’s Studies, 1985, and Women’s Studies Committee, 1984. I had no idea what I would find in them, but they turned out to be a huge part of this project. I was aware of the undergraduate WGS program in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), but these files showed me a program in a different NYU school (the one I am currently enrolled in!) that began almost a decade earlier than the CAS program. Through interdepartmental communications, proposals, event fliers, brochures, journal articles, and many interviews, I learned about the Women’s Studies program at NYU SEHNAP.
Figure 1. Memo to Dean Griffiths from the Faculty Women’s Studies Committee.
On December 6, 1979, four SEHNAP professors sent a memorandum to Dean Griffiths letting him know about the Faculty Women’s Studies Committee (I will refer to this as WSC, and it appears in the archives under a few names including Women’s Studies Planning Committee, Women’s Studies Committee from 1979-1981, and Women’s Studies Commission after 1982). The SEHNAP WSC was a “direct descendent” of an all-University women’s network developed in the academic years 1977-1980 that included faculty from the Graduate School of Arts and Science and Gallatin in addition to SEHNAP (Fisher, 1981). The network initially wanted to develop an all-University WGS program, but by the end of 1980 agreed to “pursue the possibility of developing Women’s Studies Programs on a school-by-school basis.”
The WSC began as a self-selected group of SEHNAP faculty and administrators “devoted to developing within SEHNAP an awareness of women’s issues and the relevance of feminist scholarship and research to the human service fields” (SEHNAP WSC, 1982). The WSC included Professor of Educational Philosophy Berenice Fisher, Professor of Health Education Vivian Clarke, Professor of Educational Psychology Iris Fodor, Professor of Counselor Education Mary Sue Richardson, Professor of Educational Psychology Judie Alpert, Dean of Students Pat Carey, and Professor of Dance and Dance Education Marcia Leventhal. On the WSC’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, Fisher wrote that “the vision of feminist faculty converging from a wide variety of fields inspired us to come together in the first place” (2002, p. 295).
Click here to read the history of the WSC, as told to Professor Jerrold Ross by Professor Berenice Fisher (then the coordinator for the academic year 1981-1982) in a letter from November 5, 1981.
Figure 2. WSC members were prepared to study WGS programs at other universities and develop a plan and budget, and invited the Dean to meet with them to discuss. This handwritten note was attached to the December 6, 1979 memorandum, scheduling that first meeting for Thursday, January 17, 1980.
Fisher wrote about her experience of institutionalizing WGS into a professional school in a 2002 article called “Women’s Studies in the ‘Women’s Professions.’” I requested her memoirs from the NYU Libraries and looked up the members she mentioned in the article, emailing an interview request to anyone I could find. I wanted to know why they joined the WSC and their experiences of meetings, events, and teaching. In December 2023 I spoke to WSC member Judith Alpert, now Professor Emerita of Applied Psychology. Concerned with the lack of attention to women in curriculum and the issue of departmental sexual harassment, Alpert asked to be a part of the WSC. She echoed the importance of visibility that many WSC members I interviewed spoke of, and how they worked to “let people know that they existed.” Mary Sue Richardson, now Professor Emerita of Applied Psychology, was hired in Counselor Education in the 70s at the beginning of second wave feminism. When I spoke to her in March 2024, she told me about a feeling among new hires that they needed to pay attention to the feminist movement because students would be interested in new perspectives. Patricia Carey, who retired from her role as Associate Dean at NYU Steinhardt in 2018, was asked to be a part of the WSC, and when I spoke to her in February 2024, she said,
I had to be part of that. Because women meant white and I was a black woman, so where do I fit in? I insisted that I fit in and be part of the conversation. [I felt] if you're going to be part of something, be part of it. Show your face, show up. You have to be visible. You have to let people know you're around. You can't sit back and think that you're going to be found. So you have to step out there.
In our February 2024 conversation, Pamela Fraser-Abder, current Professor Emeritus of Science Education who joined the WSC in the early nineties, told me, “Bernice approached me, and it was not because my focus was women's studies per se. My research was on gender and cultural issues in science, and looking specifically at how women were responding. I was bringing in another perspective.” Emily Wughalter, now Professor of Kinesiology at San Jose State University, joined NYU SEHNAP in the 80s as a Professor in the Department of Psychical Education and Sport as the first faculty to join outside of the original WSC members. When I spoke with her in April 2024, she told me that she was immediately curious about feminism at NYU, and she found Fisher and sent her an email where she introduced herself as a new faculty member who wanted to be involved.
Figure 3. Flier from the Women & Health colloquium. The WSC hosted a four-session colloquium in spring 1981, with the topics Women and Health, Women as Nurses, Women and Mental Health, and Educating Women for Social Change. According to a February 1981 memo from Vivian Clarke to Dean Griffiths, the Women & Health session was attended by approximately 100 members of the NYU community.
The field of WGS was born in the Liberal Arts, and for the most part remains there. I was fascinated by learning more about this endeavor as someone who completed her undergraduate B.A. in the Liberal Arts (English/Creative Writing) and is now completing a professional M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs. Fisher (2002) wrote about the gap between Liberal Arts and professional education, especially affecting professions that are already stigmatized by class and gender. Despite these pertinent connections, “the story of women's studies in the women-predominant fields has remained an untold part of women's studies history” (Fisher, 2002, p. 294). She writes, “Even when we faced similar issues, our project differed from liberal arts-based women's studies in significant ways. Our main concerns focused around activism, interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, difference, research, and the deconstruction of the ‘women's professions’” (2002, p. 295).
Figure 4. Brochure for a conference on Women in the Human Services: Dilemmas of Caring hosted on Friday April 15, 1983 and sponsored by the SEHNAP WSC.
Click here to read the full conference press release.
One of the main concerns of the WSC was how to integrate feminism into professional fields, which are “shaped through interaction with practice,” rather than through theory and research, though those are critical as well (Fisher, 2002, p. 295). The WSC decided that the best way to increase feminist consciousness in their fields “was to make [their] presence felt in as many ways as possible” (Fisher, 2002, p. 296). At the end of the year in December 1980, the Women’s Studies Planning Committee sent a memorandum to Dean Griffiths with an update on their progress to date. They were actively pursuing the “development of a series of program specializations centrally linked by a basic core curriculum on Women’s Studies,” which would soon offer feminist courses for the following decade.
Click here to read the WSC's proposal for feminist education in SEHNAP, under a program called Women in the Human Services.
References
Commission on Women’s Studies, 1985; The Guide to the Administrative Files of the Dean of the School of Education, Daniel E. Griffiths; RG 26.0.1; Box 1; Folder 29; New York University Archives, New York University.
Fisher, B. M. (2002). Women’s Studies in the “Women’s Professions.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 30(3/4), 294–303. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40003264
Women’s Studies Committee, 1984; The Guide to the Administrative Files of the Dean of the School of Education, Daniel E. Griffiths; RG 26.0.1; Box 12; Folder 6; New York University Archives, New York University.