Guest blogger: Hana/Connor Yankowitz
This summer, I spent ten weeks working at the Stanford University Archives, concluding two years of research on the history of feminist and queer studies at Stanford. Originally sponsored by the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), with later support from the Clayman Institute and Stanford Historical Society, my project sought to expand access to materials involved in the evolution of feminist academic and research programs at the University.
Previous project updates (circa 2023) are available on the Stanford Libraries website and through Gender News. This article summarizes that early progress, as well as highlighting some new additions.
Through the course of this self-directed research project, I created a digital exhibit on Stanford Libraries’ Spotlight platform featuring:
- A 130-year timeline of feminist and queer Stanford communities
- Several articles discussing the changing portrayals of feminism in campus journalism
- Hundreds of newly-scanned documents from the history of the FGSS Program
- & more!
My main objectives in creating the exhibit were: 1) collecting Stanford’s archival feminist documents together in one place, 2) creating a detailed timeline for easy reference, 3) putting together a map charting the movement of feminist institutions over time, and 4) compiling a database of feminist and queer classes offered at Stanford. These resources, I hoped, would make the historical research process much smoother for academics and activists interested in the topic.
Timeline & Documents
In order to put together the Spotlight exhibit, I sought historical information in existing digital archives, including the annals of the Stanford Daily, institutional holdings in the Stanford Digital Repository, and various archived websites in Stanford’s Web Archive Portal. I used the information I found through searching these digital databases to add key feminist events, such as the founding of the Clayman Institute, to my timeline. My goal was to create a comprehensive overview of the evolution of feminist studies at Stanford, as well as noting important developments for its compatriots in what might be called “identity studies”: racial/ethnic studies, disability studies, and queer studies. The resulting timeline tracks these academic and social communities from the University’s founding to the present day.
Unsurprisingly, I found that many activist and identity studies organizations had deep ties. For example:
- The first acting director of African and African American Studies, James Lowell Gibbs, also supervised SWOPSI and SCIRE, the extra-departmental programs that offered early women’s and gay studies classes.
- The Feminist Studies Program was founded by a committee at the Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research), and the two organizations shared a building for decades.
- The Jewish Studies program’s first conference, in 1987, was co-hosted with Feminist Studies, and focused on Jewish women’s studies.
- Since 1991, the Women’s Community Center and Queer Student Resources have shared the Fire Truck House.
In addition to my timeline work, I also spent many months processing documents from the Archives’ Feminist Studies Program collection. In order to make materials from the collection available digitally, I had to identify which documents seemed most important, scan them, and create detailed metadata for each file. I performed this operation for over 600 separate documents in total. I was surprised to find how much human labor is behind every entry in the Stanford Digital Repository. Even in what often feels like a Golden Age of technology, people power really does hold up systems of knowledge.
Though I had initially hoped to conduct the same process for the Clayman Institute collection, I quickly discovered that it was too vast for one researcher to digitize, containing 142.5 linear feet of material to the Feminist Studies collection’s 20 linear feet. Instead, I concentrated my attention for the summer on the first six boxes of the collection, containing records from the Affiliated and Visiting Scholars’ Program between 1977 and 2004. These papers represent a rich vein of information about the program, which allowed local independent scholars (as well as those only in the area temporarily) to take advantage of Stanford’s resources and feminist community. I was impressed to learn of the wide span of projects conducted by Scholars during their one- to two-year terms at the Institute, including medical sociologist Pamela Eakins’ studies of childbirth; historian Judy Adams’ oral history project on women peace activists; John Pettegrew’s research on the rise of college football and masculine fan culture; playwright Carol S. Lashof’s theatrical work on motherhood; and psychologist Esther Rothblum’s lesbian studies books.
I also gathered a number of new items for accession from several people involved in feminist academia over the years, including Feminist Studies co-founder Estelle Freedman; former Associate Director of FGSS, Patti Hanlon; recent FGSS Student Services Manager, An Nguyen; and current Clayman Institute Communications Manager Cynthia Newberry. The materials included photos from the 2013 launch party where “Feminist Studies” became “Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies”; digital copies of the Clayman Institute’s upRising magazine; and announcement posters for events both recent and distant.
The Interactive Map
At the start of the summer, I completed my interactive map of feminist communities on campus and added it to the exhibit. I learned a great deal about mapping from the cartographic process, which took much longer and was more complex than I had initially expected. This section details my experience and experiments with various geographic tools.
My goal was to plot all of the historical locations of four campus institutions onto a present-day map of Stanford. These four institutions, chosen for their relevance to feminist and queer communities, were: the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the Clayman Institute; Queer Student Resources; and the Women’s Community Center.
I planned to put a pin on each location where the organizations had resided throughout their respective histories, and label the pins with basic information such as their address, organization name, and director. I envisioned viewers navigating the map using a slider that would allow them to move through time to see where Stanford’s feminist and queer communities may have congregated at any given date. To this end, I put together a spreadsheet detailing the name changes, various directors, and relocations of each program. I hoped that after some reformatting, this data could be plugged into some application to become a map overlay.
Unfortunately, as I quickly found out, this seemingly simple task was not something most mapping software was designed to do. Many possible options, like StoryMaps, were too simple, and did not support the kind of functionality I wanted. After researching some different options with the help of David Medeiros at the Stanford Geospatial Center, I decided to try out ArcGIS Pro, a high-powered map-building software with capabilities beyond what I needed.
Several tutorials (and a lot of trial and error) later, I had created a clean, working interface… but unfortunately, one that could only be viewed on downloaded software, not embedded in a website. David suggested that I switch to ArcGIS Online, so I started over with the online software. Frustratingly, ArcGIS Online lacked many of the features I had found helpful in its desktop counterpart, so I had to compromise on some elements. For example, the online software lacked the ability to generate multi-line labels that would not overlap with each other, leading me to work with less streamlined pop-ups instead. In the end, the web embedding capability of this version won out, and it ended up in the exhibit.
The Classes
My final endeavor was to create a spreadsheet listing every feminist and queer studies course offered at Stanford since the university was founded. I ended up splitting this objective into two separate projects: 1) A list of the courses that officially labeled themselves feminist, queer, or women’s studies classes (including those endorsed by on-campus feminist institutions), and 2) a broader list of courses concerning gender and sexuality in general, including those predating feminist institutions.
For the first project, I found courses through feminist newsletters, course lists produced by the Clayman Institute in its earlier years, and historical syllabi, as well as Stanford Bulletin listings for the FGSS Program. For each course I found, I noted down the information available, as well as its source. The resulting spreadsheet currently catalogs over 3,000 classes from the years 1972-2024, including their year, quarter, course number, name, professor(s), and course description.
The second (and currently unfinished) project was somewhat more challenging. How do you identify which classes, of the many thousands offered at Stanford over more than a century, concern gender (especially in the years before any formal gender-related academic institution existed)? While there are new ways to attempt to extract this type of data programmatically, there are challenges to undertaking that work across a textual corpus of Special Collections materials, including lingering questions around copyright that could require further investigation.
WHAT’S LEFT TO DO
Though my time on this project is over, there is still work to be done on the history of feminist studies at Stanford. For one, I would love to see a digitization project on the (very extensive!) Clayman Institute archival collection, since few of its documents are available online. I suspect such a project would require the work of multiple interns over multiple years, but I also think it would yield some fascinating lost stories from the Institute’s history.
I would also be very excited about the possibility of a series of feminist-studies-focused interviews under the auspices of the Stanford Historical Society’s Oral History Program, which has already interviewed a number of the Clayman Institute’s founders as part of its Pioneering Women series. It is a rare opportunity to be able to talk to the creators of a program, and both the FGSS Program and Clayman Institute are young enough that many of their early participants are still around.
Finally, I hope to encourage feminist organizations (and by extension, all organizations) at Stanford to continue maintaining a historical record by donating materials to the University Archives. Future researchers will thank you!
Hana/Connor Yankowitz (they/them) graduated from Stanford in 2023 with a major in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and minors in Studio Art Practice and Creative Writing. They have been working at the University Archives ever since. They would like to encourage everyone reading to save copies of their favorite webpages to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to help combat link rot.
Major thanks to the Stanford Historical Society for their generous support, as well as: Josh Schneider and the rest of the University Archives for their warm welcome, David Medeiros for helping demystify ArcGIS, Quinn Dombrowski for their data wrangling wizardry, Jessica Cebra for providing metadata aid, Chris Hacker for his scanning assistance, and all the folks at Clayman and FGSS for their help in locating historical materials.
