Stanford, Women Faculty, Feminist Research and Teaching: Some Historical Reflections

March 7, 2024
Presenters: Nannerl O. Keohane, Myra Strober
Moderator: Margo Horn
At its founding in 1891, Stanford was one of a very few private co-educational universities in the country, with 130 of the 555 places in the first student body being held by women. It was also one of the first institutions to offer advanced degrees to women from the beginning. Stanford’s first female faculty members, however, numbered just six throughout the university’s first decade, and it would take much longer for scholarly programs on women to be established.
In this presentation, political philosopher Nannerl O. Keohane and economist Myra Strober discuss the history of about a dozen women faculty members who were active at Stanford in the 1970s, and those professors’ collective efforts to create institutions supportive of women on campus. These institutions included the Center for Research on Women and the academic program in Feminist Studies.   
This group of women experienced together some of the strengths and downsides of the second wave feminist movement. Keohane and Strober will discuss their motivations, their ambitions, and how they did their work. They will also describe both the support and the skepticism these women experienced from the top male administrators at the time, and how these institutions have evolved in subsequent years.