Online Archive

Interviews with Liz Bondi, Alice Brown, Mary Buckley, Lynn Jamieson, Patricia Jeffery and Fran Wasoff

Liz Bondi

Reflections on being and becoming feminist in the academy

Liz Bondi reflects on being and becoming feminist in the academy

Órla Murray: What were your experiences coming into the university as an undergraduate, as a postgraduate, as a woman at that time, and as an activist, was there a sense that they were accepted identities within academia at the time, or was there resistance, or challenge to that?

Liz Bondi: Well I had no concept of a feminist academic… I didn’t see that. It didn’t occur to me. I was involved in student networks and I was involved in citywide networks… For much of my undergraduate time, I lived in a women’s collective where for some of the time I was the only student, some of the time there was another student, people were doing lots and lots of different things. So I simply didn’t recognise that possibility. It began to become real for me only after I became a PhD student and met feminist geographers, and I’d begun to read a bit of their work. But I still wasn’t quite getting it, and I needed conferences and networking… I was taught entirely by men. I was supervised entirely by men. I wasn’t particularly troubled by that. But I identified a bit as a troublemaker or risk-taker. I got into arguments with people. That was just who I was… Once I had literally a stand-up argument with a lecturer in geography in the foyer of the building. And I think he probably bashed something that was going on in student politics, and I’d retorted. And I stood my ground, and I can’t remember exactly how he communicated this to me after that event, but I won his respect. And that was really important… He might not have liked the manner in which I did it, but he was willing to go along with somebody who was prepared to argue and make a case…

ÓM: I can’t really imagine that happening now, but yeah!

LB: So I didn’t feel excluded. I felt there was a lot to protest about. Also, in a sense, I felt I had a voice. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to use it. I think that was the challenge: not knowing how to – not being sure.

On the "with gender" degree option at the University of Edinburgh

Liz Bondi speaks about the “with gender” degree option at the University of Edinburgh

Liz Bondi: …we also did have a master’s programme.

Órla Murray: Yes.

LB: In those days, we also had a gender studies master’s degree. So that was going on at the same time.

ÓM: And was that similarly structured in terms of it being a rotating responsibility between the same feminist women?

LB: Shared, rotating, I can’t remember. I do remember working with Tricia on it and I remember working with people like Fran… But there would’ve been a bunch of others as well.

ÓM: And so did that run during the same time?

LB: More or less, yeah.

ÓM: Ok. And what sort of format did that take, was it the same sort of honours courses that postgraduates could take as well?

LB: I think it must’ve been but we must’ve had a core course for that. I think the contemporary debates course really came out of that… That was, one of the things that we could do in those days. I don’t know if we still can put on the books a master’s level course and then allow honours students to join it… You could share lectures but have different tutorial provision. So we did use a number of those things to make the whole combination work…. I didn’t feel the master’s was ever as successful as the undergraduate. I think because it never found its market. And it needed a bit more of a market, to use that language, it needed a constituency in a very different way from the undergraduate. And I think the undergraduate, in the way it was originally designed, could survive on a very small constituency. While the will was there from the teaching staff… I think that the workload allocation models and all of that probably were part of what killed the whole thing…. And that’s also inevitable because when you innovate it’s different… from when you’re continuing and revising…

Alice Brown

Reflections on women's labour at the University (coming soon)

On activism and pedagogy in the academy

Alice Brown reflects on connecting activism with pedagogy based on the 50/50 campaign and the Gender Audit.

 

Alice Brown: From an academic point of view, we started to draw up something called the Gender Audit. We were trying to show and demonstrate that women were very underrepresented in all spheres of life, whether it be politics, business, in the law, and medicine. A number of us put that together voluntarily before the Scottish Government did eventually put some financial backing to it. It’s something we tried to produce to demonstrate the position of women and the extent it would need, a concerted effort in different spheres, in order to make women’s participation and representation much more equal… It was an interesting time for academics who were working with other people. The campaign operated at different levels and in different ways. But it was exciting for students because it was clearly a way in which students could see how a lot of the theory about elections could be applied in practice. Some of the students obviously got involved in that…

Marta Kowalewska: Did any of your students get involved in it after?

AB: Yes, they did. And of course some of them went on to play very active roles themselves in that, or indeed in the media and in academia. I think as someone teaching at university, I always find it hugely rewarding to see what your students do after the lectures. It was a good time, a very exciting time in Scottish Politics. 

Mary Buckley

Reflections on the 'Women in Politics' Course

Mary Buckley speaks about the Women in Politics Course, and how it came about at Edinburgh

Órla Murray: When did the Women in Politics course start?

Mary Buckley: …Cross check with others, I think it started in ’87, ’88. Female students had asked for it. And I confess my reaction was… double-edged, because a part of me thought, ‘that’s great’, and a part of me thought, oh no, my teaching load is heavy enough, and there’s so much to keep up with regarding the Soviet Union. But yes of course we did it.

ÓM: Did they come to you specifically, or the department? What was the negotiation around whether or not that course would run? Was it like, ok yeah the students want this course, or was it just, does someone have the room to teach this?

MB: Oh, it wasn’t about the room. I honestly can’t remember how it happened, I mean I think we just thought we’re morally bound, we ought to do it. Because- I could see the sense of having it. Even though it was extra work. It was those two issues. And I knew how to throw together a course on it really easily, because it was only a one-term course, it was a half course, not a full year course [1]. Maybe by then we’d lost the five weeks in the summer term, I honestly don’t remember. And it’s very easy to do liberal theory and socialist theory, radical feminism, and then later, I wrote in Black feminism. Alice and Fiona had a more British politics strength whereas I was Soviet and East European politics, also I brought in ‘women and war’ as a topic, which I liked. So we each had our different strengths that we could pool.

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[1] Mary Buckley also observed in her full interview that she had taught on two women’s studies courses before coming to Edinburgh at the Open University and for an MA at the Institute of Education when she was teaching part-time in 7 institutions in London. Her doctorate too helped her put together the Women in Politics course, and included political theory on the ‘woman question.’

Lynn Jamieson

Reflections on being feminist and doing feminism in the academy

Lynn Jamieson reflects on being feminist and doing feminism in the academy.

Lynn Jamieson: …it sometimes is problematic…like, the research I did on sexual offences and rape trials, I know we got labelled. I was doing it with Beverly Brown and Michelle Burman, and we got labelled the three sexes by the legal profession. And the Law Society of Scotland characters that were around at that time basically just dismissed the work as feminist. So, feminist equalled not worth paying any attention to. And that’s problematic. But there was nothing that we could do about it, really. It was a prejudice that was there… A blind prejudice. So that is difficult. But, you just have to chip away as best you can… I guess if we’d been different people maybe that research would’ve had more impact, that’s the irony.

Órla Murray: As in, this sense of if it’s seen as not political, which is not actually necessarily possible, but not political and therefore more neutral and therefore more legitimate academically? Have you seen a change in how feminist or gender studies academic work has, like the legitimacy discussion around that? Have you seen that change over time in terms of people taking it seriously?

LJ: Well yeah, now that we’ve got this mainstream… this new school course adopted by a head of school at the top level decides that we should have a gender course…You couldn’t really imagine that when I started academic work. It was like, we just maybe [did] take it for granted that we were going to be doing this, almost like under the radar, and it would be built bottom up. You never would’ve imagined it that way round.

Patricia Jeffery

On teaching Gender and Development, and the “with gender” degree option at the University of Edinburgh (coming soon)

Reflections on the legacy of feminist pedagogy and collaborative practices in the academy

Patricia Jeffery reflecting on the legacy of feminist pedagogy and collaborative practices in the academy.

Órla Murray: Was there a sense that discussions were being had in broader academic networks, whether feminist or informal women academic networks or the BSA, the British Sociological Association, about gender and feminist teaching? Were there collaborations or informal discussions with colleagues in other institutions or departments about how to do this, what are you teaching, can you help me with some references… was that going on?

Patricia Jeffery: Yes, I think one thing to bear in mind is that when this started in the early 1980s, there was no internet. There was no email! So these networking activities that are now the sort of thing that we do all the time, were so much more difficult. I mean you had to write a letter, or type a letter on a portable typewriter. Those kind of communications were not… [sending out] a group email to female colleagues and say “help, I’ve got this sort of dilemma, I want some advice on literature that I can use to put across this point, or has anybody seen a good film on-“, that kind of mass email that you could visualise sending out now, that wasn’t an option in those days! I suppose the networking was very much through letters, but also through conferences… But I think also in general people have been much more reflexive in the way they approach teaching, not just in relation to gender studies. I think some of that has been inspired by feminist discussions and if you think about some of the feminist interventions in discussions about methodology and the politics of the interview… a lot of that has started with feminist interventions, and now people are much more inclined to say “but that’s just good practice”. It’s gone back the way into a more general approach, and it can no longer be claimed as specifically feminist and I think pretty much the same could be said about a lot of the ways in which we deal with teaching, not only ideas about active learning. They’re not specifically to do with gender studies teaching.

Fran Wasoff

On her own pathway into WGFS

Fran Wasoff: I was born in 1945 in New York City, and I came to Scotland initially for three months, but I’ve stayed for 45 years. I did my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics. Then I changed fields a number of times. But of most relevance to this is when I came over, I had been involved in the women’s movement in Philadelphia and I looked for a women’s group here. I found the women’s liberation workshop and became involved in a social action group. We started the first refuge for battered women in Scotland in Edinburgh, that opened in December ’73. From that, I became the first Scottish coordinator, or coordinator of Scottish Women’s Aid. I had a feminist social action pathway in my life as well as a postdoc in maths and I decided I would rather do the feminist stuff than the maths stuff.

Reflections on mainstreaming gender-related teaching in the academy

Fran Wasoff reflects on mainstreaming gender-related teaching in the academy.

Fran Wasoff: One of the things that I raised an objection with my colleagues was, ok, I’m doing a gender course and the unifying theme is gender, and you’re doing law and social policy… I had also taught on law and social policy, but let’s take a different one. Let’s say health policy. So where are you teaching gender in health policy? Do you think you’ve just farmed it out to me and that you don’t have to pay attention to it?

Órla Murray: Did they respond well to that?

FW: No. They didn’t, they went, ‘Oh of course we haven’t’ and I said, ‘Oh really, could you show me where, I don’t quite see it’. So gradually they would bring in a gender dimension. Social policy is essentially a social democratic subject. It is fundamentally about equality and inequality, but the equality and inequality it looks at is income, outcomes in education. And gender wasn’t one of the dimensions of inequality that was originally fundamental to the subject. But it later became much more embedded in the core subject area, it wasn’t just farmed out as ‘oh she does the gender course’.

ÓM: What was that change then over time? Did the course organises start to bring in gender or were there guest lectures…?

FW: Quite a mixture. It was really gradual, and I think it was hard for the boys. But I mean, they did it in the end. I wouldn’t say they did it brilliantly, but they made an effort.

Reflections on the Centre of Research on Families and Relationships and being feminist in the academy

Fran Wasoff reflecting on the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) and being feminist in the academy.

Órla Murray: What about your involvement in the centre for relationships and families? Families and relationships?

Fran Wasoff: Looking back on it, at the time we thought of it as a feminist institution, mainly women work there. It was a hugely supportive working environment, the women and the men who worked there. There was hardly anyone who worked full time. First, we ran a collective directorship. It was four of us who were co-directors. And [in] the ten years that it was running, I was there for eight of them. We would disagree about things, of course, but we never had a personal row. It was really a lovely working environment, from where I was sitting. And because, women [who] were doing this job tended to be over-qualified because they were part time jobs, they would’ve had much better full-time jobs had they wished to have a full-time job. They worked their socks off. And it was very innovative. Very supportive. We did things that other parts of the university simply didn’t do. We did a lot of work on knowledge transfer, we produced a briefing series that is now a normal thing to do for research. But [back] then it was new. We employed a graphic designer to make it look decent. So it made us look like a much bigger organisation than we actually were. It had tremendous readership, I mean research briefings are… well, everyone now does them.

ÓM: Yeah, it’s a common thing.

FW: It is! And if you can’t produce a four-page summary of your work then forget about it.

ÓM: Yeah. Was that an explicitly sort of feminist activity, or was it sort of conceptualised in those ways?

FW: Not really. It was just all of us were feminists, that’s how we wanted to work.