Part 3 of the six-part interview with Dr. Carolyn Rhodes discusses events surrounding the organization of the Women's Caucus at ODU and its effects on campus.
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW
WITH DR. CAROLYN RHODES
Digital Services Center, Perry Library
Old Dominion University,
Norfolk, Virginia
Part 3: March 27 and 31, 2009
by Karen Vaughan
Vaughan: OK. The Women’s Caucus was formed in 1974 to advance “the welfare of women throughout the university.” You and Dorothy Johnson from the History Department are credited as co-founders. Can you talk about what led you to even consider a caucus?
Rhodes: Well there were a few of us on campus who had been keeping up with the nature of women’s stirrings around -- you know Ms. started in 1972. Dorothy and I had both belonged to women’s caucuses in our professional organizations -- for me, SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association). People everywhere, and certainly on our campus too, in the late 60s and 70s, women who were getting more and more aware of problems and you had a reaction of hope and puzzlement and anger just the way Blacks were asking a lot of questions, women began to too. And then to start protesting here at ODU, we would unofficially be wary about systematic unfairness that we thought was happening, particularly hiring practices, and made some gestures like questioning differences in renewing instructors’ contracts—men were more likely [to be retained] than women. Let’s see… I think that happened before we officially formed. We didn’t start having meetings with minutes and officers until 1974. But before that, there was a young woman in the English Department who was not rehired, when a man, a comparable man really, in our school had much less to recommend him and he was kept on. I went to the Dean and I said why is this fine young woman being let go, when you’ve kept so and so who didn’t have as good teacher evaluations and such. He answered me that the man had a wife and a child to support. And I was not at that time even wise, or wily, or adept enough to say, for all you know she had a mother who knows what else. And that’s not the point. That’s not why you hire and fire. But we had no data. And without data we couldn’t prove the kind of suspicions we had about unfairness based on gender. Salaries were totally secret; perks like release time for research went to upper ranks, and few of us could get into the upper ranks, and we had reason to suspect that from a thing like what happened to Tania Modlreski, we suspected that hiring happened on an old buddy system, and keeping happened for some unknown reasons. We could see the old buddy system working . . . so that we had a lot of questions about both retention and tenure. We were not radical. Well, we were not radical compared to people who are called radical – at least here. No body was expressing rage, the kind of rage that Robin Morgan gathered a lot of articles in the collection Sisterhood Is Powerful. That was in 1970, and I guess most of us had looked through it. She talked about women having "something like a 5,000-year-buried anger.” We read it but we were not yet ready to fully be quite so fervent. We didn't feel like rabble-rousers. I’m sure we shared a passion for justice, wanted equity, and not just for ourselves, but for the women on campus, anybody, and that included a lot of traditional women who saw us as trouble-makers. They felt in many cases that you make things worse by making waves. We were sure that teachers could be role models, and among other things we encouraged student women to form a caucus of their own.
Our most knowledgeable early Women's Caucus leader, as you mentioned in your question, was Dorothy Johnson. She had worked with the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) on our campus for some time, was totally congenial with and working with men who were leading the AAUP and she was one of them—one of the leaders, and had experience in checking things out with statistics and such. She had also known of reports of status of women on other campuses that were ahead of us in keeping such data. She’d been teaching a course on the History of American Women. That course became – I’m jumping ahead for a minute, but it’s interesting – that course became the one well established course that we incorporated into the first year of trial teaching for an organized Women’s Studies Department. That was in ‘78, ‘77. So besides that teaching, she had done research centered on activist women of the early 20th century -- well from World War I on through the 30s and 40s -- for instance, Alice Paul. When we got the grant, she got the papers of Alice Paul in our library [actually, the papers from an organization “National Woman’s Party”]. Anyway, Dorothy was elected our first president for the Faculty Women’s Caucus in 1974. She was more patient with men in power than I was. Of course I wanted to look like a lady and a cool intellectual. So I sometimes heckled the sexists, in spite of that, and I got hurt, and then just like any female, though I was a feminist in a sense, I retreated to the women's room to cry.
Actually in those days, my notions of feminism were limited. I wasn't aware of the variety of meanings for the term; I knew only the dictionary definition. And that boils down to equality for women, or working for fairness to women. In the early 1970s I couldn't analyze patriarchy. I had no idea that some people were excited about women’s roles in paleo history, you know the ages of goddesses, or women-centered thought. I had never heard of feminist theory. My notion was that humanism, fully understood, fully acted on would solve our problems.
So Dorothy and I were safely tenured and older. We were both in our 50s by 1975. I’d been raised by a Southern mother, and I generally behaved as we were expected to behave, we ladies, the way ladies should behave. And some other activist women who got together as we were moving--about a year ahead of 74, we were really moving toward shaping up a caucus. These younger women – they were all instructors I think – they were untenured and at the instructor level you’re mostly transient, and you’re certainly endangered if your department chair or even some of your male colleagues happen to think you’re making waves.
So as we were eager to develop a caucus, my young colleagues and I from the English Department – the instructors Tania Modleski and Nadia Coiner – were eager to do whatever was the next thing. We had heard of Sheila Tobias who was a well known feminist at that time. She was much published in the field of attempting to get mathematical training equal for girls in school from 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade on because if you don’t know math, you’re not going to be able to be a scientist or enter into a lot of other solid fields. So, we went up to meet with her. We had a contact who had let us know that she who came from Connecticut and had worked with, probably led a women’s caucus in a school in Connecticut, was spending her summer on the Upper Peninsula in Maryland. We got in touch and said can we come up and find out from you what’s the first step in making a caucus. We told her what had been going here, and she told us you have suspicions and you’ve got some small incidents, and that’s useless as evidence because only you think that those incidents prove anything. We had to have data, and we lacked data. We had to have evidence. So, she said make and distribute a questionnaire. If you can’t get the data from the authorities, you get the data from the women. At that time, ODU had a full time faculty of a little less than 500 and 99 of us full time women were in it. So, we spent some time doing a little more asking around with caucuses that were going on and finding out what we should ask those women about their salaries and other things we wanted to compare with male faculty. That took the whole fall of 1973. We printed up the forms. I felt a little bit good as a psychologist because I knew to leave wide margins and some ways about phrasing questions so that they couldn’t be accused of being biased. And other people, a lot of people, cooperated. We distributed those questionnaires in spring of 1974 to our 99 women who were full time faculty, and we were amazed by the return. Sixty percent of them answered what we asked. Now, if you know anything about questionnaires, it’s not surprising if 90% of them get thrown away and 10% returned. Even for issues that you care about, you know it depends on the questions and how excited people are about wanting to take part. But 40% is wonderful – we got 60%, which told us they would be happy or reconciled to telling their salaries and giving that other status information that we asked which people generally kept very private. It took us three years of maneuvering, later, after we presented these results to President Bugg – I’m jumping ahead again – but it was finally evident that our 60% sample had been accurate, you know for the discrepancies [between male and female salaries] -- $1,000 a piece at different levels of earnings for a rank, like associate or assistant professor.
Vaughan: And so what was Dr. Bugg’s response?
Rhodes: He didn’t respond at all. He didn’t respond at all.
I want to give credit, too, to the people who worked with that questionnaire. You realize that when you get answers from 60 people for four pages of questions . . . There was an amusing incident when the bunch of women who were shaping the women’s caucus were sitting around a huge dining room table in my house and tallying up these questionnaires and getting ready for some kind of event in the evening. It happened that there we were in the big living room and in the kitchen;
Ernie was helping me catch up for the party and was scrubbing the kitchen floor, mopping the kitchen floor. And his son came in and said, “Dad what are you doing? What’s going on here?”, because through the windows he could see this crowd of women around the table. Lloyd left in disgust when his father explained that he was helping me get ready for an evening event, while the women’s caucus was working in the living room. Anyway, we got all that data and it was the summer of 1974 that these wonderful volunteer statisticians, Phyllis Nagel and Joyce Webb, worked up all this data in this intricate way. You had to take total data which were available with no gender for salaries at various ranks, and you had to do this statistical thing where, if women were earning this and if everybody is earning that, then what are the men earning? And they did it.
So, as I told you President Bugg did not respond. Nobody responded. The women’s caucus officially had begun, and we had to be happy as we got no answers to do other things that caucuses do. Our membership grew and we had women join that encouraged us by paying their dues. They paid little fees and they paid the dues of belonging and tallying up questionnaires and joining committees and gave time and energy along with money. They also, we think, they tried, to persuade other men and women on campus to respect our views even if they didn’t share them. And actually lots of people, not majority men in things like AAUP, were already cheering us on.
So, we kept waiting for that official data from 1974 to 1977. As I said, when it came, it confirmed what we had devised, our specialists. So we were growing in strength, in caution too. In 1975, we began to publish a campus newsletter; we called it ODU Women’s View. At our monthly meetings we did special things that we thought would help, like showcasing women speakers and feminist topics. Adrienne Schellings gave a presentation – librarian – on sexism in the Library of Congress Catalog names. People all pitched in. The newsletter publicized our events, and it let faculty review new books about things that we thought mattered for feminists and for change, and there were feature articles that various ones of us wrote.
Vaughan: So, I’m assuming you encountered some kind of opposition. Can you tell me what challenges you had in moving forward and what strategies you used for making your point?
Rhodes: Well, in those years of frustration, there was a little development. It developed from nothing to denials, fervent denials, and then promises to work up the facts and give them to us. Meanwhile, not enough happened. We kept busy persuading our colleagues and our chairs and our deans to bring feminists to campus for workshops and lectures. We kept going to our caucuses and other organizations, like our professional ones, and generally trying to consciousness-raise on the campus while we were hoping to get something to happen. This whole sequence of the years between what happened before and what happened during those troubled years when we had data and we couldn’t get more data has been written up in an article where you can get all the details of our whole first decade. Exhaustive statistics that our people turned out, year by year, we kept doing it every year. For that you’ll need to read “New Women at Old Dominion.” It’s an article in Stepping Off the Pedestal, subtitle, Academic Women in the South. It came out in 1982. There were essays from a dozen and more colleges and universities in southern states where activists recorded the struggles that were going on since the 60s to improve the status of women and also broaden the curriculum by that time we could say something about that by the time it was published, well it went to press in ‘81, published in ‘82. So, about broadening the curriculum in some of these schools to reflect feminist perspectives and foster all kinds of future progress.
I composed the New Women article with the help of Fran Hassenchal and especially our statisticians. In a way those 12 pages seem now like you know poetry – Wordsworth said, “old forgotten far off things/ and battles long ago.” Yet I can select a few striking episodes to show how tense we sometimes were.
Vaughan: And I will attach that article to this interview. [Click here for “New Women at Old Dominion” article.]
Rhodes: Oh, thank you.
March 31, 2009: Discussion about Women's Caucus continued.
Vaughan: It’s March 31, 2009 right now and we’re talking to Carolyn Rhodes about the Caucus. This is part 3 of her oral history interview. Tell me what were the Caucus’s visions for the campus?
Rhodes: We started out as – I already pretty much covered in the beginning remarks – we started out wanting to get data about women’s status. That was our main goal -- what were our salaries and the patterns for hiring and promotion. With those data, we could press for benefits equal to men’s. But those initial goals also worked long before we got answers to interest women to join us. We did that big questionnaire and everybody knew we wanted to act that way. Meanwhile, we also wanted to showcase women with lectures and bring in interesting speeches. Even at that time, particularly the stronger feminists were envisioning projects so much wider than just affirmative action for women, faculty women. We insisted from our beginning in 1973 that ODU needed day care -- day care for the children of women on campus, all women -- and a women’s center, and a women’s studies program.
When the “New Women” history [“New Women at Old Dominion” article] of our growth went to press in 1981, we stated some enlarged goals. We commented that among the four founding goals, three had been met. First, we then had an AA/OEO Officer (Affirmative Action/Office of Equal Opportunity). And it was monitoring, as we had hoped, monitoring all the kind of data we had been trying to get and didn’t, and then also giving procedures so that people who wanted to appeal for suspected unfairness, that is being subjected to unequal treatment by comparison with men, had ways to make it formal. Second -- so we got that goal – and our second goal, the Women’s Center, had opened in 1976. Third, after a trial year in 1977/78, our Women’s Studies program became permanent. We still didn’t have day care, or what options there were, were by no means adequate.
So in that article about our first decade [click here for the report by Judith Andre], we moved on at the very end to speak of some other dreams for the future. We wanted a Chair in Women’s Studies. We wanted courses for retraining community college and high school teachers in hopes that our women’s studies curricula would spread beyond our campus. We called for developing a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies – students then could already earn an undergraduate certificate, and the program even had a few graduate courses through Humanities, but scattered. So, how far had we come? Rather than funding an endowed Chair – I mean, now, how far had we come – rather than funding an endowed chair, we have done well at funding a number of fellowships for students. Still, we don’t have the kind of day care program that we envisioned. Yet the current members of the University Women’s Caucus – I forget just when the name changed, but early – keep pressing for the service that parents need, not just faculty parents, but all women on campus.
So, I can say that throughout 36 years, the Women’s Caucus has continued to add goals, I think very thoughtfully. The members keep alert and oppose threats of backsliding from those original goals of equality for women and faculty privileges. Now they have a strong presence of administrative women who are also saying what their needs are. The caucus lists, in a little publication, its achievements every year. The past year’s president tallies them up. And they archive their records here at the Perry Library. Current activities are posted on the Women’s Caucus Web site, in looking it up: University Women’s Caucus Web site. There you will also find listed accounts of some past projects and the names of the yearly presidents.
In 2007, Karen Vaughan designed a digital history of the ODU Women’s Caucus. She selected major episodes to feature and illustrated them with photographs and relevant quotations, news articles, and stressed the way that the Caucus has contributed to a woman-friendly campus.
Vaughan: What other departments were affected by the work of the Caucus?
Rhodes: Well, why do departments and how do departments change their policies?
We have to guess about whether we were part of the reasons. But we had plenty of evidence to tally up how many departments began to seek and hire more women faculty. The Athletics Department provides a vivid example. The basketball coach, a woman, happened to answer questions from reporters with information making plain that there were unequal resources given to women on the women’s basketball team. She made a big mistake. Her male superiors ordered her to resign, and she wouldn’t do it. She refused. The Caucus heard about it, petitioned the President to intervene. I’m sure other groups on campus added their protests, and she stayed. She did apologize. Her team did well, and before long she was hired away to take a better job. We believe that the succeeding woman coach and her teams got support of a better kind. Certainly they won some famous victories.
Vaughan: Who was that coach?
Rhodes: You know, I’d love to tell you both their names, because the first one [Pam Parsons] went on to some other southern school which later beat us significantly at certain times. And the second one was here for a long, long time, looked wonderful with her baby on her hip as she was coaching, and I guess took us to something special.
Vaughan: Was one of them Maryann Stanley?
Rhodes: Yes, yes. I think she was the second one. Sorry, sports are not my thing.
We’re discussing what differences did the Caucus make? Well, we could see hiring patterns across time, and they got better. We also followed trends in women vs. men earning Ph.D.s in various disciplines. For some years, the Psychology Department had been hiring only males at the entry level, the assistant professor level, for permanence. That’s the entry point for Ph.D.s. At that time, women’s ratio among the new Ph.D.s in Psychology had reached 30%. Nearly 1/3 of all new Ph.D.s – none hired here. I think resumes are generally very similar among new Ph.D.s – why prefer men consistently? Then came a year -- I wrote letters to the Courier and other people made kinds of--spreading the information around. In 1979 Psychology hired five new Ph.D.s and they were all women. No men as new assistant professors. So, at last they turned toward gender balance. We had one Caucus member who foresaw trouble. When these women would be scheduled to come up all at the same time to be considered for promotion and tenure, what would happen? There would be a good excuse to take only a few of them. So, because typically promotion bringing tenure means permanence, you give it out very lightly. So this worrier of ours thought it’s a patriarchal plot to set up the prospect of letting some of these women go. It didn’t happen. All of them moved up to become associate professors.
Well, it’s not possible to prove exactly how much our efforts influenced the increased number of women hired in various departments; we think so. Doubters have said that anything that happened on campuses after 1975 was simply part of the evolution of tolerance in America that women were going to be treated equally as everything else changed for the better. You know, women’s pictures appeared more in magazines, and things like that. I don’t think so. Our campus changed earlier and more quickly than a great many campuses. The changes brought women, faculty and administrative women, and those newcomers brought more ideas for further progress for any kind of feminist endeavor. Certainly we gave ourselves credit for making a difference, many differences. In 1993, the University Women’s Caucus asked me to give their 20th anniversary speech. Here’s how I looked back to 1979, more than a decade ago, when the hiring of women faculty came to a new level. As I said, the Psychology Department had brought in those five women in ‘79, that year, and three of them were Elaine Justice, Janis Sanchez-Hucles, and Barbara Winstead, who made great later careers. Also, in 1979, the Political Science Department made a breakthrough -- two new female PhDs at once: Chris Drake and Maryann Tetrault. That was the first time they had ever had tenure-able women in that department. 1979. We had never harried them because qualified women, that is the percentage of women earning new Ph.D.s was very low. You couldn’t pester a department – Engineering, for instance – where there were no women available. In departments where women were not rarities, 1979, a wonder year, brought four more females who were also feminists to the School of Arts and Letters: Erlene Hendrix, Lorraine Lees, Janet Katz and Janis Peri. Then, in 1980, Betsy Fallman and Judy Andre came along and they immediately sought out the Caucus and offered to serve. A further phenomenon of ‘79 and ‘80 was bringing in women at the full professor level. Helen Yura came to Nursing in 1979, and two women were hired in the School of Business in 1980 after Betty Diener became Dean. With that, I rest my case. Departments certainly were seeking eligible women.
Vaughan: How would you say the work of the Caucus still affects the campus?
Rhodes: Well it’s a permanent effect when all sorts of situations have become more equitable for women -- administrators, chairs – oh we were so happy when we got that first dean. Our members and people who are unbiased are certainly more alert to circumstances that hold women back. Changes that foster fairness are generally welcome, with some very amusing holdouts. When the Caucus got started, we were nearly alone in recognizing some of the institutional disadvantages imposed on women. We stood out I’m sure, as leading movers and shakers proposing some of the earliest improvements. Happily, every successful resolution of a problem makes the next one easier to deal with, because others on campus, individuals and groups, come in and they share in supporting the kind of things we were working for. What I find especially rewarding is that sometimes our projects brought about institutional changes that have gone on permanently, gone on till now for decades and benefit campus life. We were the first group to insist that ODU needed an affirmative action office of equal opportunity, and we had to persist for years in calling for that before it happened. In the interim, others rallied around too. Perhaps we can be seen as initiators, rather than accomplishers. You know the spirit of the times. Still there’s no question of the lasting benefits of having an affirmative action office. Something that means a special appreciation for me is the way the caucus recognized, from the start, the need for a women’s studies program. Their first documents called for that, and that would be 73-74 or something. And it finally came about. Circumstances made it possible to create a women’s studies program here, and the Caucus members were the ones who took the lead in shaping it. Many of us became teachers of the women’s studies courses.
Vaughan: How do you still take part in the Caucus today?
Rhodes: Today? [Laughter] I go to their meetings, and I’m fascinated by the way that Caucus keeps attracting very capable women who are every bit as good, if not better, than we were at the start for perceiving where something needs adjustment. And they know a lot better about how to go about adjusting. They’ve become established enough on campus that a committee of them can get attention immediately, get an appointment immediately with provosts or whoever is managing whatever they’re wrought up about. Actually, I’m not involved very much. After 1976, I became more and more deeply, giving time to women’s studies – teaching and -- Women’s Studies has an advisory committee which approves other people’s courses and makes various decisions. Of course, I keep up my Caucus membership. I attend meetings. I like to hear what they’re up to, recently. Their own awareness that they have to sing their own song, in other words, they have to let the world know what progress they have taken part in as they move on. I do--it happens that on a couple of occasions I have, let’s see I think since the middle 90s, certainly in the last decade, I have thought of others who could be nominated and gathered attention to name candidates for the Caucus’s yearly awards. Each year they honor someone who has improved women’s opportunities or status or general welfare on campus. You know, come to think of it, that kind of showcasing of worthy women, not always our own members, is another example of the ways we have affected the campus community. And it encourages feminist role models. For anything that’s going on now with the Caucus, the best informants would be active members or officers from recent years. I’ve admired more of their projects than I can possibly recall. They repeatedly lobby for practices that would improve conditions for students, for example -- everything from better night lighting of the campus to more than I can remember. And they regularly take quite a vigorous part, an active part, in joint events together with the Women’s Studies Department. The Caucus seems to me especially good at mentoring incoming women. They connect anyone who’s interested with others who are well established here and those two decide what’s the best thing next. Also, they have a formal meeting every year that is a workshop about writing effective applications for promotion or tenure. You’ve just got to remember that I retired in 1990, and that’s nearly 20 years ago. So, questions about the Caucus in the last couple of decades should be answered by members who are presently active.
