revolution/evolution

A Journal of Contemporary Feminist Issues / 1995-1997

Click here to see all of the Revolution/Evolution journal covers.

Figure 1. Covers from the first two issues of revolution/evolution.

I saw the phrase “Revolution/Evolution” in my early searches on the Archives website, and when I got the materials, I found five issues of a student journal preserved there. revolution/evolution was published by the NYU CAS Women’s Studies program from 1995-1997, when the program was housed in the History Department under Professor Marilyn Young. It was created by Debra Michals, then a History PhD student who worked as the Associate Director of the program, beginning in 1994. She headed the editorial committee as the supervising editor, and her biography in the spring 1996 issue reads, “Debra launched this journal to create a safe space for the emerging awareness and ideas of the young feminists she’s met (and those she hasn’t met yet) at NYU” (1996, 69). In the welcome page of the first issue, Michals wrote, “What we offer here is a forum–one that hasn’t ever existed at New York University–where students (undergraduate and graduate) can express their ideas, thoughts, or experiences about gender issues on campus or in their personal/political lives” (Michals, 1995). She ends her letter with, 

What the founding of this journal has proven to me is that there is an energy out there, a hunger to speak about and fight for feminism’s future, to reclaim a term that has been stigmatized for too long and to redefine it affirmatively and in a way that has meaning for us both individually and as a collective (Michals, 1995).

I had already planned to attend the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Annual Conference in November 2023, where Dr. Michals would be moderating a panel about feminist pedagogies and digital technology as teaching tools. I attended her session (which happened to be incredibly relevant to my project) and met with her briefly at the conference before formally interviewing her a few weeks later. In our conversation, Michals told me that she started the journal to create a community for the students of the Women’s Studies program. While History was its departmental home, the program still operated out of a tiny, shared office with no physical space for students to hang out and find each other. Though she and Anne Green, then a PhD student in the English Department who also worked as an editor, were the “sort of directors” of the journal, they wanted it to be a democratic, student-run opportunity for community and expression.

Michals said, 

We would come together, meet as a group, and we edited democratically. It was the best job I've ever had because it was a chance to innovate. It was a chance to create and build something. [The students] sat around, they read everything, they made their comments, decided what got in, what didn't. There were times people argued about things, and times that Anne and I had to mediate some pretty heated feelings among students, but otherwise I think they really loved what they could create together.

Green echoed this in my conversation with her, saying the journal was essentially a student club, where students would come together to talk, write, plan, share, and ultimately have another venue to express themselves. She also spoke of the intersectional mindset that she and Debra shared, invoking legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theoretical framework of “intersectionality,” which describes how women of color are marginalized by both racism and sexism, and therefore, their multiple intersecting identities need to be considered when theorizing on how our world is socially constructed (1991). 

Click here to read “Feminism at NYU” from the 1995-1996 issue.

In each of my interviews, both women recalled a memory about how students’ identities showed up in the journal. Green said, 

I remember in the first edition, there was an incredible young woman from Southeast Asia, who wrote why she was welcoming having an arranged marriage. She wanted to argue why it was feminist in her culture to have her family engaged in this really important decision, and I remember so vividly sitting around with all these students just hearing her talk about it. 

Michals said, 

When I went around that very first meeting, there was one young woman of color that basically said, ‘I'm here to make sure this is not going to be some white girl project where our voices are going to be silenced.’ And she's saying this stuff in the nineties, which I have to say is pretty progressive, pretty bold to say that as a student. Students can be vulnerable, right? And she was brave, and I loved her so much. And she really was in many ways, the spirit of what revolution/evolution became.

In our conversation at the NWSA conference, Michals told me that this student passed away at a young age. Her comment is memorialized in the welcome letter of the Winter 1995-96 issue, where Michals wrote, “This is not just another ‘white girl’ venture, as one of our editors came to ensure at our first meeting. Rather, this is a publication that recognizes the need for feminism to be open to everyone and to every question.” 

Click here to read the full welcome letter from the 1995-1996 issue.

Figure 2. Covers from three issues of revolution/evolution.

Figure 3. Women’s Studies Internships advertisement in the Fall 1996 issue of revolution/evolution. On the internship program Michals said, “We didn't have one before that in any formalized way. I had a rolodex, and that's where I had all the internship programs that were willing to work with us. In that job, in some ways it felt like we were breaking new ground. We really wanted to take something that [Professor Carol Sternhell] had started, that others were passionate about, and bring it to the next phase of its life. That was [Marilyn Young’s] mission, and that was a mission that I was charged with supporting.”

Click here to read “Student Attitudes on Women in Politics: A Survey” from the fall 1996 issue.

Five issues of the journal were published, and it ended in Winter 1997 after Green left NYU and the Women’s Studies program was in transition. Each volume contains personal and political essays, academic papers and reviews, short stories, poetry, photography, and artwork. Seeing the issues of revolution/evolution in the NYU Special Collections & Archives was really a turning point for my project. Flipping through them, I was inspired by the stories, poems, and art created by Women’s Studies students. I reminisced about my own experience at Brandeis University, when a friend revived Artemis, a feminist student magazine that was published intermittently in the 1980s-90s, in our 2013 semester. I was the layout editor of Artemis for two years. In talking to the women who were involved in creating the journal, I felt the familiar sense of pride I always feel when speaking to other feminists and WGS students and scholars. They had a desire to take what they were learning and teaching in the NYU Women’s Studies program and create something tangible and communal. And in the two years and through the five issues that were published during that time, they did just that!

References

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6) 1241-1299. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039

Revolution/Evolution, 1996-1997. New York University Archives Collection of Publications and Ephemera; MC 334; Box 351; folder 6; New York University Archives, New York University.