ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH DR. CAROLYN RHODES Digital Services Center, Perry Library Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia Part 4:  April 8 and 13, 2009 by Karen Vaughan   Listen to Interview Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Biblio

Vaughan:   It’s Wednesday April 8, I’m Karen Vaughan, and I’m continuing an interview with Carolyn Rhodes.   We’ve discussed your teaching background, your Fulbright experiences, and your involvement with the ODU Women’s Caucus.  Today I’d like to talk about your involvement with the Women’s Center and with the Women’s Studies Program. The Women’s Center was founded in 1976.  How did it come about and what was your involvement?

Rhodes:  My involvement was simply to admire Pat Hyer.  She started the Women’s Center by writing a grant that was not funded and then persuading her dean, DeRolf, to fund it anyway, do it on university money, do it at university expense.  So, all she did make me think about what Emerson said about people with forcefulness and vision:  “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man” – in this case, one woman.  Pat had arrived here in 1975 as a faculty wife with a new M.A. from the University of Michigan.  There, she had enjoyed her internship in their women’s center.  Soon after coming to Norfolk, she found an administrative job in the School of Continuing Studies, and her work was to do various promotions and run meetings and help organize courses that they were giving.  Soon after she came on campus she joined the Caucus and became an active member.  She was, a few years later, a president.  Within a year she had persuaded Dean DeRolf, as I mentioned, to let her design a grant proposal and apply to the U.S. Department of Education to fund an ODU Women’s Center.  That proposal didn’t get federal money, but her Dean and ODU’s higher administrators approved her plans and let her start the center here.  Pat ran the search committee for the first director.  The center opened in 1976 but there was that year or so of background efforts. 

Women’s centers offer non-credit courses to returning women students and to women in the community.  They have a great series of options, events and training sessions for students on campus – crisis kinds of things.  It provided, the Center as she founded it, and still does counseling and referrals to other agencies on campus and in the community.  Anybody on the faculty can call the Women’s Center and say, “Let this young woman come to you and talk to a woman you have there, and you can decide if she needs goes to our psychological service.”  Sometimes even, and in the case of Gloria Putnam, going to the Center persuades people that they’re ready to take academic courses.  The Center also organizes day-long workshops, community agencies for women where they set up booths to show the people who attend the range of local resources, such as the YMCA and health and crisis services.  So, across three decades, that center has been a great joy for other feminists on campus to watch the way the staff has grown and now meets a greater variety of needs and an ever-rising number of students and potential students, more each year who go in there for help or to help.

Vaughan:  In 1977, you worked as the principal investigator for the National Endowment for the Humanities Pilot Grant in Women’s Studies in hopes of beginning a Women’s Studies program at ODU.  Please talk about how that evolved – what was the impetus for this program, and how were you involved?

Rhodes:  Every feminist on this campus knew that the way we were offering women’s studies courses, piecemeal and occasionally persuading departments, really needed to change, become better and more meaningful and have more of them.  If the classes could be organized into a program, we’d read lots about women’s studies programs forming around the country, but what could we hope for at ODU?  Funding really seemed to be out of the question, no matter how ardent we caucus members were, and we were the main instigators.  Most of the decision makers were indifferent and many opposed. 

Who first thought of getting a grant from outside, from some foundation, from some federal source?  I can’t say for sure.  But anyway, the notion appealed to our caucus members, and we turned to the people who dealt with grants – ODU’s Research Foundation, particularly Maxine Lippman and Katherine Owen.  They had good ideas.  They said; apply to NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities).  They found a category where we might fit in our application, namely a pilot grant.  That type of funding supported trial teaching projects.  It would fund sets of experimental courses, and if your proposal convinced the NEH judges that your campus was ready to welcome and might even continue the studies you proposed.  We knew it would be hard to decide what were the best courses to start with and maybe harder to choose who’d teach them.  Soon we found out that the first step wasn’t planning of that kind, but getting university approval just to be able to apply.  Everybody had to sign off on it.  We took our hopes about this NEH application to Dean Heinz Meier in the School of Arts and Letters and found out that he was pleased.  He liked the idea and sent us right on up the chain to ask people in higher administration.  So, the final approval came from Provost Charles Burgess and that was either late in ‘75 or early in ‘76. 

So those of us who wanted to help shape it started to brainstorm and we spread the news that we’d welcome course descriptions from anyone who wanted to try to be part of the program.  Katherine Owen, Research Foundation, guided us through further steps.  We had to set up committees, then we had to find consultants to select . . . well we set up committees for various other reasons and had consultants for creating workshops to offer before the teaching year and after.  Amongst ourselves, we started a group called the Women’s Studies Proposal Development Group and we had the responsibility to choose which courses would finally make up the year.  We depended on other ODU agencies with plenty of experience to run the kind of workshops we’d need, to bolster and enlarge our teachers’ knowledge of feminist resources and pedagogies.  Among the would-be teachers for the pilot year, some had not yet shaped courses that would be suitable for cross-listing into a women’s studies curriculum.  And others who had taught such courses, namely in women’s history and in sociology of women, could join the experts who were training us. 

After the pilot year, we’d take part in extensive evaluations.  ODU’s own Center for Instructional Resources supplied our teachers with four instruments.  They could choose one or two to use to rate their courses and the teacher effectiveness.  To measure campus reactions to our startup year, we also developed an anonymous questionnaire we were going to send to all teachers and administrators on campus asking for comments on introducing women’s studies here.  Those who hadn’t even heard we were trying to do it or were running it for a year could still state their opinions about what such an addition to the curriculum was worth.  Some of the planners in our Proposal Development Group really thought why have those expensive follow-ups -- evaluations of the pilot year.  But, the ones who carried the day that we needed to review the impact of our activities were right.  Later we learned that the National Endowment for the Humanities committee of judges was especially impressed that we set up so many ratings.  Our proposal, it seems, measured up for accountability. 

As we went on shaping the proposal, dozens of people took part with varied committees making decisions, working through what to teach, how to manage the workshops, and very importantly selecting a very reputable outside evaluator to come here during each of the four semesters.  That was Elaine Rubin, Director of Women’s Studies at George Washington University, who was also that very year, the founding president of the National Women’s Studies Association.  She came full time in matters of – I‘ve forgotten – a week or more for the pre- and post-workshops.  And she came for just a couple of days during the semesters of the courses, and attended classes, and gave the teacher feedback.  But, to get back to our choices, they were intricate and they were debated.  And I’ve forgotten just the sequence of who demanded what.  But, I haven’t forgotten how urgent it was to make those decisions.

It was wonderful when all of our efforts really began to take shape.  Toward the end the time came for choosing the principal investigator, that is, the person who would organize the parts of the proposal and write it up.  If the pilot grant were funded, then she would also coordinate the four semesters.  It was my fortune, my good fortune, that Dorothy Johnson’s book-in-progress would keep her busy in the coming year – she was an obvious leader.  So, I got to become the project director.  The Research Foundation people called the job “principal investigator” I guess because so many of their grants supported scientific research.  Here on campus, I was simply “the coordinator.”  We feminists chose that egalitarian title because we didn’t want to suggest a hierarchy of director and directed.

I spent the summer of 1976 putting the proposal together.  You should have seen my house.  There were huge tables with piles of stacks of each category.  So, partly that meant I would assemble information from all those others.  It was really a jumble of material about important -- but somewhat messy -- about the teachers and their resumes and their class descriptions; also descriptions of the before and after workshops with scheduled sessions led by expert visitors; salaries and honoraria for all those people – me and the teachers and the work shoppers; lists of supplies for every activity and for office use; books that our teachers or experts wanted to have the library to purchase -- NEH gave us lots of money. It was all those little budgets which added up to one giant budget of over $50,000.  Pat Hyer dealt with all of that accounting, and a lot of the workshop planning.  If I helped, it was only as a proofreader.  The parts that were challenging for me to compose were the narratives.  I had to explain all that we wanted to do, including things that other people were making up for us to do.  Besides background commentary on the Tidewater region and the university, NEH required that we should discuss our rationale, our objectives, and the benefits we expected to come from having a pilot here. 

One way and another, that proposal was shipped into the NEH -- at the last minute, by speedy express -- in Fall 1976, all 37 pages of it.  For the next eight months, we waited to hear their decision.  We tried not to brood over it or hope too much.  In April of 1977, really wonder of wonders, NEH sent us news that they would fund our trial year.  Their commitment of $42,000 was supplemented by ODU’s $12,822 and thus, the School of Arts and Letters was granted, was gifted, was funded for the largest grant it had ever received.

Vaughan:  I know this goes back a long time, but can you describe for me the first year of the program?

Rhodes:  Well we had four semesters.  In those four semesters, our proposed plans came true.  So, that good fortune I had really continued. To begin with, the teacher training session in the summer of 1977 went so well.  We teachers were absorbed actually it reminded me of the best days of graduate school.  Trying to take it in was like old times, even the cramming, but better, better than old times I guess since we didn’t have any tests at the end.  But, you know, more serious tests -- we’d be trying to meet our own goals when we taught the courses we were redesigning. 

ODU’s Center for Instructional Resources focused their sessions that summer around two concerns, concentrating first on feminist questions and principles so that we teachers could enable our students to understand the impact and meaning of feminist perspectives.  The other concern was to practice interdisciplinary teaching.  Four of the six courses during the pilot year would be team taught, bringing two or three teachers together in one classroom, each from a different discipline.  The leaders of the training sessions demonstrated techniques for interweaving our topics and interacting with each other.  One interesting point I noticed was that when teachers differed in opinions or values, we learned that students enjoy such intellectual debate.  And, many would remember both sides, both standpoints, better than if one teacher presented them singly.  In the pilot proposal, we hadn’t thought to predict bonding among the participants.  That happened as an unforeseen benefit.  It was easy to recognize how our 11 teachers, eight women and three men, enjoyed working together and with the presenters.  We liked to trade recommendations of our favorite feminist articles, mostly from our own disciplines, and books.  And we shared some pedagogical ideas too.  We didn’t have to get them all from the presenters. 

When the fall classes began to meet, I was given full trappings of an administrator – an office and a secretary.  She was Gloria Putnam, a prize.  She later worked for and with several directors of women’s studies at ODU and became an informal counselor to students too.  Elaine Rubin stopped by my office for her fall visit when she came for advising teachers--attending classes and advising teachers.  She noticed on my wall a framed album cover of musicians:  four young punk rock musicians looking ratty and spaced out. Why did I put that on display? she asked.  I pointed to the band leader and told her that he was my son, Richard Hell, the group’s leader, lyricist, and guitar player, lead guitar player.  "Well," she said, "I knew they had mothers, but I didn’t know who their mothers were!"

That fall, I was one of three teachers who got together to design ODU’s variation, or the pilot year variation, on an Introduction to Women’s Studies class.  We structured one section of it around some American feminists known for their powerful essays and speeches – speeches to promote their standpoints.  Students could choose one of them to concentrate on.  Their choices ranged from Susan B. Anthony to living activists, like Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem.  We guided them to key resources where they could find the ideas and arguments of their chosen feminists and analyze what they found in written assignments. But, then, we had them perform what was the adventuresome outcome of their study, creating a simulation.  For that, each student takes the role of his or her feminist and must express/speak/remark like she would during a roundtable discussion.  They had to perform and argue in her voice.  The women they enacted had lived in different epochs across nearly 150 years, so it was an eternal kind of thing.  And some of those women disagreed with each other on issues.  The teacher who designed this assignment and guided the interactive project was Fran Hassencahl from the Speech Department.  She was and is ODU’s Debate Coach as well as a scholar of American feminist oratory.  I had great qualms about how those intricate plans would work out.  But, I needn’t have worried.  The students kept in character and spoke as sharply as their models.  They declared and debated views they had looked up.  Those lively performances gave them a chance to have fun while posing as famous orators with strong attitudes.  And they learned a lot about each other’s research.

Before the fall semester ended, our dean surprised us with startling news.  He had made his decision to continue the program beyond the pilot year.  He announced this outcome early because our advisory committee had to create the job description for our future permanent director of the program.  In order to hire someone for fall 1978, after the end of our pilot year, that announcement of the position’s requirements had to be published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in December 1977. Then candidates could apply.  During the spring semester, our search committee would select the three best candidates and bring them to campus for final interviews.  They also had to teach a model class.  We were relieved as well as pleased to be looking for a professional director to bring us an academic background in women’s studies and a record of teaching and scholarship and, ideally, administration too.

During the spring of 1978, the classes went on just as we had proposed to NEH for the pilot grant.  My role was to teach an upper division course which I entitled “The Female Consciousness in Modern American Literature.”  The novels I chose featured the interior life, the consciousness of strong and intelligent women.  Students compared the way that various novels depict such women’s streams of thought, both when they meditate and when they make difficult choices.  In addition I had them sample psychological theories about consciousness, or attempted descriptions of consciousness.  My multiple approaches to mental life turned out to be way over-extended.  The students did well in literary explorations and analyses; however, they agreed with my recognition that we had fumbled when we tried to compare consciousness in fiction with states of mind identified by scientific psychologists.  The results just left us puzzled.  I told the class that in science, negative results are valuable for designing other approaches to what you want to find out.  But I never taught that course again that way.  Segments of some other team designed courses were probably also too ambitious.  Still most students found it meaningful to stretch their thinking and generally praised their teachers and classes.

During our summer 1978 workshops, we reviewed all those measurements of the impact of the pilot year and the teaching and everything we could think of.  I was especially curious about reading the comments made anonymously by colleagues from all around the campus.  We had 600.  Everybody filled them out.  The question that caught my attention, amused me the most—or, the answer was to the question “Do you consider Women’s Studies a valid academic endeavor?”  And, the answer was “Yes, and what is not?” 

For the evaluation workshops, Pat Hyer presented a memorable review of feminist progress at ODU.  She created a five-page pamphlet titled “A Dozen Improvements in the Status of Women at Old Dominion University 1973-1978.”  She added little tiny graphics to illustrate each of the 12 kinds of events.  Well, she assembled facts and figures to show the welcome changes.  Pat also named the people on campus who most deserved credits for the improvements.  She called those leaders “movers and shakers.”  I recommend that pamphlet of Pat’s as the most clear and concise treatment of the surges of feminist activism at ODU throughout the 1970s.  She sums up the efforts and successes of the groups I’ve been telling about:  the Women’s Caucus, the Women’s Center, and the Women’s Studies program.  She highlights such changes as establishing the Affirmative Action Office, creating new jobs for women, including many in women’s athletics, and increasing the number of women in higher administration.  We had been so amazed with our first Associate Dean and our first, many all around the campus.  Pat mentions that the just-begun Women’s Studies program, scarcely a year old, has already contributed to outstanding gains in “materials and resources” relating to women’s concerns.  The NEH money helped.  Primarily at that time, she points out that the Women’s Center stood out for their collection of over 500 books and articles.  And the acquisitions at the Perry Library were also noteworthy.  Her 12th improvement she called an “events explosion.”  In this category, she credits Tidewater residents as well as the university community, praising many “large and small events” in recent years.  She notes particularly that some of these--that a great number of these events had been planned and executed for women and by women.  She cites three conferences that drew audiences of 200 or even 300.  Smaller, more frequent meetings range from brown bag lunches at the Women’s Center to the kind of events that were being offered by all the women-centered groups – films, lectures, workshops.  [Click here to view the pamphlet.]

Personally I can add that ever since, for years now -- that’s three decades, we feminists still combine to share sponsorship for meetings and special occasions.  I keep applauding the mutual support that’s always shown by the Women’s Center, the University Women’s Caucus, and the Women’s Studies program – rather, the Women’s Studies Department as we now have become.   

For me as coordinator, the year went real well.  Most of our projects fell into place or we found alternatives.  The pilot year tested, as planned, a coordinated curriculum for women’s studies at ODU.  We were proud that the University, and in particular the Dean of Arts and Letters, Heinz Meier, enabled us to continue and improve women’s studies.  By the end of the pilot year, we were reaching the wider campus, beyond the School of Arts and Letters.  Students and staff and faculty and administrators were becoming aware of our will to expand and rethink traditional knowledge. 

Sometimes I hear myself praised as the founder of Women’s Studies at ODU.  That’s a myth, no matter how flattering.  It overlooks many founders – those dozens of other women and some men too – who were eager to plan and fulfill our feminist goals by shaping lasting and growing academic programs.  The truth is more constructive and memorable than the myth.  We were a crowd of ardent -- and I like to say, believe -- even dedicated visionaries.  In the decades since 1978, we’ve all – all the starters, all the founders – have been marvelously rewarded as we watch later students and newly arriving faculty seize our vision and expand it, and they fulfill their own new dreams.  The eager cooperation of 1975 and 1976 that developed the pilot grant starting in 1977 has wonderfully been followed by flourishing growth.

Continuation of discussion of Women’s Studies Program

Vaughan:  Tell me what about happened with the Women’s Studies Program after Nancy Bazin arrived in 1978.

Rhodes:  Nancy came with real credibility for Women’s Studies. She had a list of previous achievements that were in this interdisciplinary world and very impressive. She had written a break-through book; a really leading book that is still very respected and used called Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision.  That was back in 1973. And then she had directed women's studies programs at two universities. At Rutgers, she had been the founding director. I had the happy job to chair the search committee and we all found her the most impressive of three candidates, and they were all impressive. So, that was a great pleasure for me at the time, to manage that search committee -- more so looking back.  I will not digress to tell you about search committees that were not so happy.

In her subsequent years at ODU, Nancy's achievements exceeded all of our hopes -- serving for seven years as Director of Women's Studies, and taking it as a half-time position, with the other half in English. She expanded the program.  Numbers of students grew.  And she established certificates for both undergraduates and graduate students. Undergraduate would be something like a minor, but it was a certificate that they could take on to graduate school if they cared to continue in Women’s Studies.  She continued to publish, especially articles on prominent women writers. She also wrote about curriculum development within Women's Studies and other aspects of the field.

One of the most outstanding policies, practices that she followed was persistently reaching out to other departments.  Some of them were not very happy to be indoctrinated into women’s studies.  But she created workshops, and she arranged with the deans to have daylong sessions.  One I remember in particular the Biology Department, because she brought in feminists who were writing new biology texts.  So, in these different departments, she was introducing faculty, people like me who had never heard of it in graduate school, to feminist research in their fields and, naturally they also became aware of feminist goals and principles and a little theory maybe.  When she returned full time to the English Department, she became chair there in 1985 and moved on again in 1989.  She was doing publications and other contributions so much so that she received the honor of becoming one of ODU's rare Eminent Professors -- to see her wide range of achievements, just Google "Nancy Topping Bazin." There are 2,680 entries. As you know with Google, some of them are replicates.  But there’s one thing on Google that will really tell you all you want to know, and vividly.  She has a Web site of her own.  And she has put on it her multiple careers beginning with academic positions, you know education and posts she’s held and then her publications and her administrative work. There is a second section in her Web site about what she’s been doing after her retirement.  She retired in the year 2000, and she returned to her current creative profession – she’s an artist.  Her Web site displays many paintings and graphics she has done, and it lists the galleries where her works are available.  At least two reference works give attention to her, and they feature Nancy’s career, some of the span and depth in women’s studies.  Florence Howe, a real founder of Women’s Studies and worked with the Feminist Press forever, published a book in 2000 called The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers.  Nancy contributed one of the longer chapters. 

Nancy's biography appears in Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975, which is a book covering almost 2000 early activists. Every entry lets the contributor list her activities after 1975. You don’t get in unless you had activities before 1975, but you get to tell about the rest. The database which names all of these is under the heading “Pioneer Feminists Project” http://www.edouglass.org/pfp

Vaughan:  Are you in that book?

Rhodes:  Nancy has been nagging me to send it in, but all along the way, anybody who has some title, whether it’s even Temporary Director of Asian Studies, you get all these letters from Who’s Who types of books, and I’ve never been into that very much.

Vaughan:  Well, tell me how much did you continue to be involved in Women's Studies during that time?

Rhodes:  Oh, very happily, because I got to teach and I didn’t have to think about budgets.  So, while Nancy was our leader for seven years, I served on what Women's Studies has instead of a departmental set of senior patriarchs, it’s called the Women’s Studies Advisory Council WSAC.  I was on it a lot of the time, I forget just when and when not.  But it’s interesting tasks you have, such as approving incoming courses that may be very venturesome or that may be standard. Our major fields of overlap in the early days were literature, psychology, sociology . . . and another which I’ve forgotten [history].  So on the WSAC, I shared in the decisions as I said about recruiting new courses and taking up other issues, advising on other matters, the happiest of which was when we would have our summer retreat.  All of us on the WSAC and then other faculties who taught for the program liked those informal gatherings as well.  But it was serious stuff and a treat if, for any of us who were interested, and I surely am, in hearing about the latest developments because our philosophy and feminists were great and you would know what was going on in a very easy way.

Before my book First Person Female American was published, I began to – that was 1980 – I began to offer courses about life narratives, that is, autobiographies, journals, diaries, and personal letters. I taught various approaches to American women's autobiographies, usually once a year, and at first these were cross-listed for English credit, but later they earned a Women’s Studies designation only. That means that they’re truly interdisciplinary, including literary.  My most sweeping course of that kind featured male as well as female autobiographies.  Let’s see I titled the earliest of my primary courses “When Women Tell,” so I called this course “When Men and Women Tell.”  I think it probably had literature credit because graduate students could take it for credit and it dealt with men’s, you know, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle…  and some very other interesting male autobiographies.

Let’s go back to Nancy.  She had a real network.  She had been in the field when it was elemental and knew feminist leaders.  That enriched us so much.  She brought people to ODU for lectures and workshops, two a semester very often. But the ones I especially remember and found it enthralling to get together with, not just for their public lectures but for little gatherings at some feminist’s place like Nancy’s or mine, and have some private time -- Peggy McIntosh, Florence Howe, Catherine Stimpson – we could look it up – those were really memorable and interesting to know.

After the crisis of leadership in Women’s Studies – you heard me talk about that – it was resolved in 1986 -- the best aspect of change was that the Director in future would be a full-time position.  All that Nancy did, she did with only half-time credit: administration, teaching in English, teaching in Women’s Studies, doing workshops...  And then her leadership had helped Women’s Studies to grow so much and flourish that when she left, future directors could get full-time and focus entirely on the program.

Vaughan:  So who was the next director after Nancy?

Rhodes:  Well, I missed getting to know the incoming full-time Director, Dr. Ellen Lewin, during her first year at ODU. Remember we had those two directors and then Ellen came and my share in the program was suspended for both semesters we were in China.  Ernest and I went to The People's Republic in August 1986, and Ellen must have arrived soon after.  And we left Beijing in July 1987. Ellen was here for another year.  Oh, I have to tell you about my summer.  We took the Trans-Siberian railroad through Mongolia to Moscow, and we stayed over in European cities until we finally flew home just in time for fall 1987 classes. As you know, travels were really superb experiences for me as had been that year of teaching and traveling in China.  So we completed our journey around the world, coming back the other way and had to settle back into university life when we came home.  That first year when I was back, that was ’87-‘88,  
I became extremely involved in the East Asian studies preparation.  We had seminars for really more than two semesters.  Our leader Dr. Thomas Burkman arranged for us to take Mandarin a little bit, you know enough to say polite phrases and to take calligraphy classes and to hear and question the visiting guest lecturers he brought.  So, we had homework to do for Saturday morning sessions that he taught history and such of China. In those sessions, we learned things in chronological order you know a quick view of the dynasties but then the more recent politics, particularly twentieth century politics, of China and Japan. So I was busy in all my spare time reading the texts that Burkman assigned, some joyously and some were rather heavy.  So I never really got to know Ellen Lewin.  I did attend events that she arranged. I recall sessions under her leadership about women's potential for making decisions on their own healthcare.  She had multiple credits in feminism including anthropology and a focus on our bodies, ourselves in variant forms.  During Ellen’s second year here, she decided administrative work was not for her and found a place back in California where she could return to her research.

Vaughan:  So, I guess there was another search for a Director.  Tell me about that.

Rhodes:  Yes, indeed.  This search went pretty smoothly and all the effort was done, I think real happily, by Janet Katz.   Anita Fellman was selected and arrived here in the fall of 1988.  For the next 20 years she was the one who enriched Women’s Studies in new and very many ways.  In my opinion, the most momentous difference that Anita made was to upgrade our program to a Department. Along with that, our faculty doubled --from one full-time to two full-time.  I know it sounds like a joke, but it really mattered.  It mattered for the students.  It mattered in the new courses we could offer.  And, mercy, it mattered for the director in the sense that only now, only after she got the second person could she ever take some time off, maybe some summer time or I think she even took a semester off once.  So, it enabled her to begin new research and to finish some that she had been doing already.

Since 2008, in case you ask, after Anita’s retirement, we have been led by Dr. Jennifer Fish.  Also, we have added another faculty member half-­time, back to that old pattern between English and Women's Studies.  Lindal Buchanan is our half-time person and Althea Tait is our second full-time faculty member.

Although I retired in 1990, which was only two years after Anita arrived at ODU, she did very nicely keep me constantly in touch with Women's Studies. For some years, I stayed active with the Friends of Women's Studies, and I'm still an honorary member of the Board of the Friends of Women’s Studies. That means I receive the minutes of meetings; I could vote if I wanted to on decisions, decisions like the focus of the next annual meeting and raising money for our scholarships and things like that.  Best of all I can attend social occasions and meet all these new people who are coming in -- current activists not just among the Friends, but among the students and among the faculty who teach the cross-listed courses in many departments.

I would like to be able to link this interview with some of the honors and testimonials given to Anita when she retired in 2008 – very exciting times.   During the Friends Annual Dinner we surprised her with what we’d organized in advance and funded -- a scholarship in her name that lets students take part in service learning, which had been a long interest of hers.  It still is in her retirement she’s doing things about service learning.  That ceremony was so delightful.  I recall the touching remarks made by her former students. That must have been in February or March in the very last few weeks of the year and her final teaching year, there was a farewell party for her that was in April, and it too was a delightful experience.  Faculty colleagues made statements; her Dean came and added praise. [Click here for Dr. Chandra DaSilva's remarks.]

Vaughan:  We definitely, if I can find these materials, I’ll definitely link them.

Rhodes:  Ok.  Well, I had to get in the act.  I had a short thing to say.  I thought the comments were so fine.  You know you can’t record the fun everybody had and the decorations and food and things like that.  But the Dean has sent me a copy of what he said.  Mona Danner was utterly charming and hasn’t gotten around to sending me a copy.  And, I think I have my own copy.

Well, I'll mention again, as with Nancy that only Google comes close to telling the whole story.  Check under "Anita Clair Fellman" and you find 4,940 entries about her career history, her publications and other noteworthy records. You know we all go to conferences and they get listed, and if we co-write an article, it gets in there.  One work of hers that has special meaning for me is a chapter that she and Barbara Winstead contributed to a collection of case studies.  Seven women's studies programs around the country were honored by being selected to take part in this self-analysis.  The book was called The Courage to Question.  And, so ODU was there among colleges like Hunter, Wellesley, Oberlin.  It was sponsored by the National Women’s Studies Association and funded by other people too.  Colleges all across the country were represented.  Oberlin is in the mid-country, and others were Missouri, Colorado, Oregon as well as the east coast.  ODU’s was the only southern program that the National Women’s Studies Association decided to include.  The final book was called The Courage to Question: Women's Studies and Student Learning published in 1992.  The book presents chapters from each of the seven institutions, and every one has to focus on their program or department, its scope, its goals, what learning skills are particularly emphasized, and the structure of how the program is set up. I really felt reflected glory about that.  Nancy and Anita had kept our Women's Studies program growing and creating new branches to focus on as they went along.

Nancy, incidentally, had a perfectly marvelous retirement party that I didn’t mention.  We put out a whole book – “Like Minds” did a special issue putting out a whole book of testimonial letters from her students, her colleagues and people who she had worked with for research and so forth.  I wish I could find that for you.  Anita, like Nancy, became a treasured personal friend to me. They both love to exchange advice on what to read next. Anita introduced me to many Canadian women writers whose books I really enjoy. One in particular, Carol Shields, I reread, and I recommend all of them to others to read.

Vaughan:  It’s April 13, 2009.  I’m continuing my interview with Carolyn Rhodes.  In 1985 [actually 1986], you helped to found the Friends of Women’s Studies organization.  How did that come about?  

Rhodes:  Women's Studies of course had started off sort of gloriously with that Pilot Grant. Eight years later, the Friends of Women's Studies began quite grimly with our program under threat.  In 1985 when Nancy Bazin resigned as Director of Women's Studies to take over becoming the Chair for the Department of English, nobody foresaw that President Marchello would decide he wouldn’t search for another director with professional qualifications, that is, someone with a degree and teaching experience in Women’s Studies and scholarship and maybe even an administrative record too.  Apparently, he assumed that any one of us who taught cross-listed courses could simply take a turn being director, sort of a short-term loan from our departments. He saw no harm in chopping up and passing around the Director's responsibilities. Some supporters of the program felt that our efforts had been thus insulted and demeaned, that it was a deliberate way to put down feminism.  But, realists said the changes were probably made just to cut costs. With drop-in directors, running the department would take less funding. 

So for the academic year 1985-86, Dr. Marchello assigned temporary directors – one for each semester.  They were on loan from the Departments of Sociology and English.  Now certainly Janet Katz and Janet Bing were really outstanding faculty in their fields and in the teaching they did for Women’s Studies, cross-listed.  They both were feminists.  They both were very active in the Caucus.  So who could object to lending Women's Studies two excellent caretakers, like those two? Every feminist on campus could object, and did, particularly every one who had worked with the program.  Anyone who cared about feminist education was aghast because to be an administrator of a program that you’re trying to grow and establish, you can’t just drop in from time to time. 

At first as we thought over what to do, what to do, we floundered.  We could not figure out any way to get the president to reverse that policy.  How on earth could we convince him to support a national search for the next Women's Studies Director, exactly as the University had done in 1978 when we chose Nancy Bazin.  And, incidentally, it’s ­also exactly as is done with searches for other programs.  Furthermore, without that national search, the president would be bypassing the Affirmative Action policies that our Caucus had welcomed and had helped to bring about after years of protest. 

So that was in place when school started at the end of August.  By October I had seen and I got so upset that I spoke about the cutback in my Women's Studies class – it was a class on women's autobiographies. One of my students that fall was Edie Harrison. Such serendipity -- right away she wanted to protest to the president. She offered to make an appointment with him and say why she thought downgrading the program was such an outrage.  Ellen Morris joined me in persuading Edie to wait until we could gather more evidence of really widespread support -- and support beyond the campus, out in the community. We knew that one person's objection surely wouldn't be enough, even when it came from someone as well known as Edie Harrison. She was prominent in politics and cultural life, as well. Also, she was a past donor to ODU and presumably a potential one.

Ellen Morris, who was then the President of the Women's Caucus, and other leaders who had in the past been officers, explained our concern to just about everybody we knew, well beyond the Caucus members. As people heard this, who were familiar with feminist teaching on our campus, they talked to other people they knew. We of course had the approval of Nancy Bazin and the two temporary directors. 

So, it was time to really get out and get busy, remembering Mother Jones's great slogan: DON'T AGONIZE, ORGANIZE!

Edie Harrison began to rally women from the political communities throughout Tidewater and more, I think, from her social worlds.  I told every feminist I knew on campus and off that we needed them. On throughout December 1985, we three, Edie, Ellen, and I, rounded up many others to join our campaign. Some of them cared enough to reach to others.  It was a ripple effect, and the ripple kept going on, circles on circles, women who agreed that it was urgent to save Women's Studies, the program, as we knew it.

By January 1986 we formed a committee, and it made a decision on what to do next.  They concluded that our best hope would be to organize and publicize a Friends of Women's Studies group. That would need plenty of members, some of them influential.  I did the homework to identify where we could find other Friends of Women's Studies groups attached of course to women’s studies programs around the country. There were not many. But the one at the University of Cincinnati was flourishing, and well funded all throughout the region in Cincinnati and around it. They published an impressive newsletter regularly telling about the activities within the department, even such things as what the faculty were publishing, as well as events and acquiring new graduate students.  When I asked them, they sent me a copy of their constitution. Sharon Adams studied it and created a constitution for us, of course a simpler one since we were just beginners.

Vaughan:  So you had your constitution already written, how did you then get the organization going?

Rhodes:  Well, I brought you up to early in 1986.   Brainstorming said let’s be warm and social as we firm up when we would like to have an organization meeting.  We picked a date -- I could look it up, I think it was as early as February it might have been March -- for an organizational meeting on campus.  The first big impressive party was volunteered by Edie Harrison at her home.  She invited potential members and let us invite potential members. The occasion was quite well attended; it was festive; it was congenial.  And, we showcased a discussion of Women's Studies – what it is and why it matters -- with Nancy Bazin talking about what we were doing in our ODU program, with other voices piping up.  Also, we held smaller gatherings in our homes and in the homes of people who really wanted to help, like Zelda.  Always, there were discussions, because we discovered many of the people who were willing to help and just believed us, really didn’t know what they were helping, and we thought they should.  Anyone who came knew – let’s see, 80, we got up to 80 after those meetings – of people willing to co-sign an invitation that we were going to mail out to many more people to come to the founding meeting of [The Friends of] Women's Studies at ODU. They paid for dinner in advance, and they knew they'd be asked to pay for membership, too.

Our core group of organizers already had commitments from notable community women to serve as officers for the group we were promoting, in the future. For example, Zelda Silverman, a leader among our planners, was the one who persuaded Nellie Hayse to become our founding president.  Nellie had served as Executive Director of the Girl Scout Council of the Colonial Coast for a long time. She was a superb choice in even more ways than we academic women realized. Of course, we knew she was excellent as a leader, a leader of a very fine organization, and that would obviously have taken wisdom and strength and charm.  Already she knew something about fund raising, I can tell you.  She brought a wide variety of contacts, both professional ones that she’d made linking with other groups and funders and personal contacts – she was a sailor, she loved to go sailing.  So her experience with the Girl Scouts and all these other things was just invaluable.  But what we learned--most of us from the faculty didn’t have any idea of the skills it would take to manage a board of more than 30 women. Certainly I didn't. And the Friends here began with that large a Board, mostly community women. Many of them had experience serving on other Boards. So, Nellie and this group got our group off to a quite impressive start.

I don’t want to take much time, although it was just delightful at the founding dinner.  We used the main event as a little interplay, conversation about mothers and daughters, using Kitty Kersey, Katherine Kersey -- a leading person on campus in helping parents know how to manage child problems and child warmth and growth --  and her daughter – I’ve forgotten the daughter’s name [Barbara Kersey] -- but the two of them talked and everybody enjoyed it.  Regula Meier made the dinner table decorations.  Everybody was pitching in. 

When Edie Harrison . . . Oh, I forgot to tell you that we recruited 150 members.  Now obviously some of them were the first 80, but they’re all dues-paying members and most of them really happy to bring their enthusiasm and commitment.  So, when Edie Harrison scheduled that meeting with President Marcello, he had already heard about the way we had rallied those community supporters. Before long, he instructed our Dean to establish a search committee to find a full time, well qualified director for the Women's Studies program at ODU.  We had again sort of a time limit – remember when we were getting Nancy Bazin, we got the description in the Chronicle a couple of months before she had to come for interviews.  I’d forgotten how tight this was, but it was.

Anita Fellman . . . My recollections very likely have lapses and errors. There's a better way to see and enjoy many things that went on at the start of the Friends group.  Anita Fellman gathered a panel of six of the founders – 20 years later.  She made a video to be shown at the 20th anniversary of Friends and to be accessible forever after as we try to talk new people into becoming officers and members.  So, these six founders got together and are sitting around a table and chatting, talking about the early days. Anita produced an 8 1/2 minute video and called it “With a Little Help from Our Friends.”  It shows us having fun while we remind each other of all that was going on at the beginning.  First person of the six was Nancy Bazin.  She reviews the crisis that set us off, and it was her personal crisis in that she tells how she was called, when away for the summer, and told:  when you came back in September, you’ll be chair of the English Department.  Nellie Hayse got us really laughing about the way she was co-opted to lead the founding officers. Barbara Winstead highlights across longer years, the continuing value of all our community members – what they bring to us and also to the ODU campus, with ripple effects.  Incidentally, about Barbara Winstead, she served as President of Friends in 2000 and 2001. And with that she became the first ODU faculty member to ever take that office. All the other Presidents of Friends came from off campus. Feminist faculty do work on Friends projects, but we remain – the Friends -- a community-centered organization. Janet Bing was another of the panelists.  She’s a current faculty member, and as you know, she was deep in before we had Friends and always stayed loyal.  She’s been tireless; she’s a resource person for Friends and for the Women’s Studies Department but never takes an office.  Life a great many of us, she will round up--what she does is she rounds up the Caucus members to get a couple of tables at the dinners. Finally, the last two, Alice Ferguson and I took part.  We had been present at the creation of Friends and pretty much present ever since.  I think Alice was a board member every single year after I retired.  I took off a couple years and drifted--I didn’t drift away, but Ernie kept saying “Let somebody else take over.”  But Alice and I obviously knew people across the 20 years, at that time, and she’s still at it.  I don’t do nearly as much as she does.  And, I want to point out that if you’re a devoted member of Friends and an active member of Friends, you have the chance to become a devoted party-goer because we give regular occasions.  Members of the Friends Board, other than the hard work they do for projects, especially the annual dinner, they’re also known for their May picnics – they have an annual picnic -- and a great many other festive get-togethers.

The video, I should say, includes visuals sampling the later landmarks in the history of Friends – a selection of course, it’s very short.  But for me, gathering that circle of panelists was sort of the best part of looking back on the beginning of Friends, and quicker than hearing me talk.

Most of us balked beforehand at being asked to perform.  I really did – I’m not a performer.  Afterwards, we were very greatful to Anita for the idea and the production.

Vaughan:  We can attach that [video] to the interview also. [Click here to find the 2006 Friends of Women's Studies video.]

Rhodes:  Oh, fine, fine.

Vaughan:  You’ve named a lot of the women from the community that were part of the Friends organization.  Can you tell me more about the kinds of contacts you made?

Rhodes:  Yes, yes.  But I’m shy to name names.  If you really wanted me to name the three dozen most significant volunteers to help . . . First, we worked with the constitution and other things being changed as we enlarged the group.  And then that smaller group, maybe as many as three dozen, rounded up the 80 who were willing to sign on and have their name on the invitation for others to come to the founding dinner and consider joining.  So, our next contacts were the 150 who did join.  All those lists of supporters are archived.  You wouldn’t want me reading them.  And, I wouldn’t want to look back over the records and try to choose which ones to name.  I couldn’t select some rather than others, and I’d feel bad about leaving anyone out.  They might feel bad too. 

I can say this, if “what kind” means from what types of workplaces or other . . . other forms of connection with the community, yes.  We lured I believe a great many from the helping professions – you know, doctors and social workers – and also from service organizations – the Y and all – along with people who were active in fundraising projects, like the volunteers who work with a professional staff.   All you have to do is think of any group that asks for donations through the United Way, like the YWCA, Planned Parenthood, and Girl Scouts of the Colonial Coast.  Nellie had mentored a very wonderful person named Marcie Germanotta, and she became a president later, some time after Barbara.  You could also think about organizations like AAUW, Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders.  We had people who were well known for their trying to get us to join all of those organizations.  Some professional people joined after being contacted by our faculty members, particularly from fields related to say the discipline of the faculty member – psychology, sociology, music, arts.  And, then too, there were social links in neighborhoods or at church from the first dozen or two enthusiasts to the next, and so forth after they heard Nancy’s wonderful talk.

 When our organizers gave us names and addresses for sending invitations, they also called those contacts in advance to explain more about the goals of the Women’s Studies program. 

In the early years of Friends, membership rose to over 200.  That number -- over three or four years -- fell a bit.  And then I don’t know how long it took to rise again, but now we have had an amazing number, over 250, at the dinners.  Of course, not all who attend join because we have special events that lure different people – musical people or service people.  They all come onto campus to the Ted Constant dining hall and through the presentations that we give they realize at least some of the strengths of Women’s Studies.  And, I can only declare, I can’t prove, the ripple effect from their coming to campus and knowing a lot more about at least one department.

The Friends of Women’s Studies has a mission statement.  It’s about—I don’t know--at least six points.  I divide them up into two categories.  The first category concerns our fundraising role, and the list about that tells all the yearly events we support and, at much greater expense, the scholarships we support.  I’d been “we, Women’s Studies” now I’m “we, Friends.”  [Laughter]  Let me read you the statement that’s on their brochure about that second aspect among their cluster of goals.  This goes beyond . . . the first aspect is fundraising and money connected.  The second aspect is this, and they say on their brochure quite rightly:  “We serve as liaison between the University and the community to increase public awareness of the Women's Studies Department” – we’ve made that change, Women’s Studies Department – “and its achievements; we foster the personal development, education, and equity of women; and we promote positive social change.”

Vaughan:  That really sounds like a wonderful organization, and by extension, it’s good for the University, and you all should be really proud of that.

Rhodes:  We are proud, and we think it does. It has effects that are positive but we can’t measure them.

End of Part 4 -- Part 5