Items, finalists for the Nonfiction Book award and the winner of the finishing line press jet boat competition is also the author of six nonfiction prose books including revenge of womens studies professor, reel girl and womens history for beginners. Author Bonnie Morris, in your book revenge of womens studies professor, revenge for what . The title is not meant to be provocative or roots, it is about having the opportunity to talk back to many people this stereotyped my fields or asked unfair questions. I have a lot of terrific students who are intimidated by the idea of taking the basic class in womens history. They come to me and expressed doubt or concern, they are afraid of what people would say, what does it look like on their transcripts of those experiences lead me to a keen awareness of how many people feel there is something wrong which looking at half of the worlds history and i negotiated many of these routes conversations throughout my teaching career. The idea of revenge of womens studies professor is i wanted to talk back in a cheerful, playful way, to be the smiling face of womens history. As a diplomat from academic feminism, i am not scary, i am approachable, i love my students, but not being rude to the professor. People who come by and say i love your class, you are not the femina feminazi, thank you to Rush Limbaugh for putting this out. The class will not hurt you, this will only improve your life, what is it like for those of us on the other side of the desk who have to deal with a whole range of our work being impugned by people who are fearful . Host where do you teach . Guest George Washington university and a parttime at georgetown and hello to my terrific students. I teach everything required for the minor and major, introductory womens history, specialized class on womens boards called athletics and gender. Overand rolled since 1996. I teach a big survey course in womens history which has 120, first year students. Right now i have athletes from every sport. A lot of people in their first year and graduating seniors who have waited all these years with a different major. Host what is womens studies . Guest womens studies has been a department or program at american colleges since 1969. The first was San Diego State in 1969. An opportunity to look at all of the humanities for the perspective of how womens lives have been shaped, that is material that is often neglected. Many people go from kindergarten through law school and never learn how to be considered an educated person. If you want to put women at the focus and look at the different experiences women have in every society because of work conditions or warfare and Education Opportunities as well, this is but chance to make that the center of your research and we cover just about everything and it is just like any other class where you take exams. Host would you do with the womens studies major . Guest there is law school. Many of my best students have become lawyers, title 9 lawyers, women worked on development, many work abroad and work with women Birth Control, the issue of violence against women in regions ranging from Northern Africa to bosnia. Many students do development in terms of profits, programming for everything from planned parenthood to organization that work with women and girls. A couple students who have gone on to med school and specialty womens health, quite a few nursing and a lot of students who are also as athletes involved in furthering womens, some were athletic trainers. Want to deal with the olympics now. Already medalist from the last winter games and another student who is interning at the winter games, helping to do some reporting on the situation of homophobia in russia. Thdo men take their classes . Lien 99 have guys in all my classes and also guys who were majoring in womens studies and at George Washington the chair is a guy. My brother took a class when he was an undergrad at maryland. The average guy who takes womens studies classes often, and maybe he is the son of a single mom and i have a few percentage of International Students who are really perhaps this is the only chance to take a class like that before they return to korea or kuwait. I have guys from iranian, Saudi Arabian backgrounds, many i recently gave a guest lecture and i have a lot of students who are curious or heard someone else say i am nice. One of my classes, they take more so they repeat. Once i got them i got them. Host what was that experience like . Guest was distressing in a lot of ways because i felt very much like a third sex. I was not obligated to address in a full head cover, body cover, down. I was not expected i was willing to cover my hair. I was startled to find a large percentage of women in the country who cover their faces and many are not qatari citizens. Many women were not visible and i am used to making a eye contact. You didnt see womens faces or mouths moving, and a sense of there being silenced with magnified much of this is a tribal. It is not mandated in the koran. The experience i had was i was surrounded by western men in suits, arab men in beautiful, crisp, white gowns and women in black who were very much coverage and it was me in a western suit. It was an eye opening experience but i also found the opportunity to interact with women from all over the arab world with what i want to do. I moderated a panel on discrimination in sports. It ended up being very much on racial and ethnic discrimination. Host read from a basic history books. A textbook intended for middle school classrooms. It was left with the impression that all of Human History was achieved by one sex. Guest unfortunately that continues. The biggest challenge for me as an american educator, womens history and womens studies from people because the assumption is all womens issues are about the body, all womens history will be somehow about sex and Birth Control. Therefore it is not appropriate for kindergarten or middle school class, education boards, ptas, people who approved textbooks for texas that is controversial. My argument is there are plenty of womens history that is age appropriate that encourage girls to consider the possibility they can run for office or look at where women have come from in terms of being close out of political life and schools and juries. It is easy to look at female achievers in history and had it been not controversial and not sexual but we dont do that. We dont do the research on the astronomer or lessons that encourage girls to think beyond the imagery of the woman in the private sphere. As a person who also leads a pee u. S. History exams for the college board, putting womens history into something that an honor student should know is gradually becoming a successful mainstreaming of womens history. Now you have to know womens history from the ap exam. It was a process but also possible to have text books that dont reflect the range of what women have done or the focus will be women and minorities and you have white women and black men and get to get left out there . Africanamerican women. That is why i insisted that the cover of my book would be a majority women of color because they have written out of the american curriculum. Host baltimore from those very differences tell us more about power, citizenship and democratic ideals. We may acknowledge our foremothers held different but equally important functions in Human History. Still most of what is described in history is indeed his story, the lives and writings of great men. When i was in graduate school, what is history . His argument was even if you rely on documents they only tell you what the author of the document wants you to know about the fact is we look at the constitution, the magna carta, the writings of men, women were usually illiterate, didnt have access to education, didnt have the leisure time or studio space to be artists and writers, didnt keep journals as i am so privileged to do. We only have stories and narratives which we have historically put down as old wives tales and we tend to think what goes on in the womens fear which is the private sphere does not count as history. Making beds, raising kids. That is important but history is made somehow in the publics fear of men. The fact of the matter is most life is lived in the fry that sphere. Host from your book revenge of womens studies professor 11 you write oppression of women is a universal norm and where theres a male standard women become a special interest group. Every country has policies to protect womens rights but they are not enforced because women are not the enforcers. Guest that is correct. The biggest example of that would be the taliban continuing to wield influence in regions like afghanistan, pakistan, where technically girls have the right to go to school but they are threatened and in the case of malalla even wounded in their effort to get an education. Most countries would say we permit schooling for girls, the safety in that process is not guaranteed and the backlash against educated girls is really an issue in more places than we care to examine. That is just one example that is very painful. Host in your book womens history for beginners why didnt you use the word story . I love that i wanted to avoid anything that would sort of pigeonhole me as a certain kind of old School Feminist who was going to insist on altering language. I want this to be as accessible as possible. I love the for beginners series because it offers an available introduction to subject matter that everybody is curious about that maybe is intimidated by. I used herstory in casual conversation. It is a reminder how we dont expect to have women at the center. The first day of my classes i explain you dont have to have a specific political viewpoint to get an a. That would be wrong. You have to put the women at the center of what we are studying. That doesnt mean we hate men. Host you talkedabout old school feminism. What do you mean by that . Guest i was influenced myself by the women who shaped 70s feminism. Radical feminism which supported the idea that there should be women only spaces where women can gather. The whole cultural movement, womens bookstores, independent presses, recording companies, all of that shaped me and it was all in place by the time i was 16 and 17 so i came into a cultural feminism very much of which was shaped by lesbian activists and my opportunity to do advanced work in womens history, i owe a debt to everyone who came before me. In graduate school the ricans turned that was expressed was how to make womens history credible and academically coherent when so much of the Womens Movement had been political grass roots activism. How do you roll that over into a field of study . My position is you have to look at the grassroots, you cannot simply use theory, you cannot use theory in language that is going to sound so difficult and arcane. I like the post modernists as as. I tend to focus on social history. Part of what i mean when i say i am old school is i think you have to look at the activism of everyday people and not just remain in the ivory tower. That is because i came out of a family that was involved in the Peace Movement. It was natural for me to go from participating in that to participating in feminism to participating in the lgbt movement. Explaining the history of how to get from a to be in all those movements is what i do. Will this start there or earlier . What is the thirteenth amendment . 14, fifteen, 18 and 99 very important also. But if you dont know the history of enslaved women and women who owned women, you will never understand why we dont have a unified Womens Movement now. Host can you be a conservative and womens studies major . Guest absolutely. That has changed. I used to have the assumption that people her major out of a certain feminist standpoint, what is interesting now is as women advance they certainly do so because of the feminists who came before them but women are now up position where they can distance themselves from earlier issues and be a leader as they define. It is challenging because i will sometimes have students be hostile to the women who went before them who enabled them to have the opportunities they have now. I also have students who will be very engage in the classroom but they lie about it to their friends and associates. At one college where i taught, the women in my class were hiding in a better reading a book on how women got the vote because their sorority head said it was giving the wrong message to have my textbooks on the coffee table when young men came to call. Really . How does that intimidate your future husband . Doesnt want you to vote . That was an unusual place but my position is everyone is welcome. Everyone is a walking narrative text. What happens to you the forms your viewpoint but lets just look technically at what the law limited women to in the past where you truly could not attend a university, you could not go to med school, you could not play sports, you could not control your own money, you could not own property, you werent allowed to train guide dogs. There were all kinds of things girls could not do. And when i was a little kid, i was a fair the brainy little girl who on the one hand was told you can do this, skip agreed, do whatever you want. To get these messages, actually women arent allowed here and there. That was a big condom dissidents blast in my developing mind. I knew girls could do more. I was in classes with gifted girls and i was surprised if they werent more outrage. I was outraged in a way that makes a person bitter, angry, etc. Whenever the wrong stereotypes of a feminist is. I am really going to do what i intend to do and it is illogical to hold back half the nation. We need to compete on the global stage. Doesnt america want the brainy girls in the drivers seat . Dont we want to keep up with other nations in math, science, physics . Host how do you define feminism today . Are we opposed feminism period . We are not in a postfeminist year of. I am very concerned about the, quote, war on women. We are rolling back access to reproductive rights, there is no end to the regrettable statistics on violence against women. We have not stopped shaming girls about their bodies, we have so much sexism in the media which implies you have to have a certain shape to be loved or popular. The problem in terms of feminism is it is true what unifies a lot of women globally is what is done to women and i dont want to identify feminism as about victimhood. You dont want victim feminism. Empowered feminism says that women should be equal in their rights and opportunities, period. Where we dont see that, we want to push forward to make that possible. And the statement, there is so much work to do, and globally the statistics are frightening in terms of womens lack of access to everything from education, to health and information about their information about their options. Host do you think sexism plays any role in Hillary Clintons president ial chances . Absolutely. I use misrepresentation in my classroom. One of my students is in it but the film looks at media bias in terms of how women are observed as they pursue a political candidacy. Inevitably they are their tone of voice and their hair is addressed. Hillary has been absolutely maligned by different commentary with respect to men dont want a woman telling them what to do, they dont like the sound of her voice. Represent hectoring stance, very much based on the dilemma should women ever tell men what to do at a macro level . The same when we were trying to get the vote. Went didnt want women making policy decisions because they felt the influence of the mother figure should stay in the home. We dont want women of childbearing age running because we have in sane myth that you shouldnt be in the oval office if you might have your period. If you are post menopausal there is a bunch of stereotypes for that too. You are too much like an older woman mother figure shaming men. You cant win. I see that in lots of campaigns. Watching the news is important, it is painful and i think it is in part because there is a long tradition whereby men define their independence by leaving home and no longer having to do what mommy says. So the psychological aspect is can you have mommy running the country . Of course because we also ask women to be multitask years and make all the decisions that keep private life in order. Applying those skills in public life, there is a lot of concern about what that means. Would it means that a woman would miss work because of child care . Usually when women are act candidate there as how can you do this and raise kids . Very familiar with all those issues. Each semester students are encountering for the first time how we analyze that, why does this keep happening when women are such High Achievers why do we find these old ideas . And it is sad for me to see students alarmed and feeling pain that their mothers feminism did not eliminate these issues. They are still there. Host who are your personal heroes in the womens Rights Movement . What a long list. My personal heroes would definitely include all of the women who started womens bookstores. The women who started womens Music Festivals, the women who made title 9 possible, furthered title 9, Bernie Sandler who looked at sexism in Higher Education. Olivia records, at the field of Academic Studies in lesbian history. My friend and mentor Tony Armstrong jr. Who started a magazine called hot wired to look at women in rock and the women Music Festivals of the 70s. Obviously people the labor around them, womens reproductive rights, the olympic champions who broke barriers, making it possible for women to do ski jump for ice hockey or run a marathon. Everyone who started the w. Nba, all of the folks who were the first to be in a class act and Ivy League School or who broke the gender barrier in the service academies. It is a giant range. I am leaving out people in late arrival feel badly about that but i admire her everybody who pushed for word womens entry into closed occupations. Host this is the first time in the olympics that women are doing in the ski jump. Guest why dont we worry about the guys