Fall 2006
Voices
In This Issue:
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Interview with Anita Taylor:
A Look into NCA Women's Leadership
Kristina Horn Sheeler
Matthew Lamb
[My election] shows somebody who’s willing to speak-up and I was that,
I was a person who wouldn’t shut-up. I remember one time saying to
somebody ‘don’t patronize me’. . . [It’s important to have] allies and tak[e]
advantage of your opportunities when they come along because this never
would’ve happened if it hadn’t been that the old boy’s network overreached
and they set up an election that was very clearly a set up. . . And so we
took advantage of it. I think it’s rightfully considered as a kind of watershed
because of not only the fact that I was president, in fact probably not even
the fact that I was president, but how it happened and the way it sort of
energized all of us who were involved in the process.
In a conversation with Professor Anita Taylor, we learned about the early
days of the Caucus and Division, the women and men involved, and the
importance of using your voice to make a difference. Professor Taylor
certainly has used her voice, her talent, and her hard work to make a
difference for women and men in NCA. This is a small excerpt from her
story. To learn more about Professor Taylor and the other influential woman
leaders of NCA, visit the NCA Women Leaders Project.
Q: How were the Division and Caucus started and what were their purposes?
The Caucus came first . . . a group first met to talk about it at the New
Orleans convention in 1970. And the reason that’s so clear in my mind is
that I was not at that convention. I had decided to stay home and get a
dissertation written, which was undone at the time and had been undone
for about three years. So it was one of those ‘it's time to get it done’ things.
People who were most heavily involved in the organizing were Bonnie Ritter
(Patton). She was one of the two people who wrote so far as I know, the first
sort of book in communication about gender communication. Bonnie Patton
along with Bobby Patton. The other people were Carol Taylor and I.
The initial goal of the Caucus was to get women into leadership positions. Women
were already a large percentage of the membership, but did not hold leadership
positions, never in the leadership, never on the programs, never in the publications.
Now I won’t say never in the publications, rarely in the publications.
[A]fter we started making some noise they kind of started putting token women
here and there but in the early days it was very low. People had to be real superstars;
Marie Hochmuth Nichols never had any problem getting represented whenever she
did something. You had to be a superstar.
They all joke women have to be twice as good as men in order to do just as much,
well it’s really true. A number of people of course have talked about how scholarship
in women’s issues began and the first question we all ask is ‘where are the women?’
And it was in the association, ‘where are the women?’ It was in the scholarship ‘where
are the women?’ Because very often [researchers] would do scholarship that ought to
include female subjects and often [it] didn’t. Often because they relied on college students
and very often were in heavily segregated classrooms.
Another one of the things that we took on really early, Bonnie and I worked together
on this project along with a fellow from Florida State, Don, and Robert Hall, who
was the association executive secretary at the time and he was a great friend of
getting women and minorities into the structure of the organization and he helped
us in a study of the Placement Center.
Now there’s another little known fact today; I mean people have forgotten in those
days placement through the association was ‘blind’ meaning that if an institution
had an opening and wanted to list with the Placement Center, they would list it
but it was not identified as where. It would be what kind of institution in the
Northeast or Midwest or that kind of thing and it would be coded by a number.
And if you were a member of the Placement Center, you paid to become a member
as a job hunter. Then you would send off your credentials to the placement center
regarding that job number. They would send your credentials to the institution.
And so you may or may not hear from them; you had no idea to whom you’d
responded unless you knew somebody who knew somebody kind of thing.
This was all prior to the implementation of anything related to affirmative action.
Lots of jobs were never listed; it was just professor X would call up his friend and it
was almost always his friend to ask about promising people and his friend would make recommendation usually of one of his students and so jobs were filled and no one ever
knew even that there was a job available except for people ‘in the know.’ The old
boy network was no joke. It was real. And so we did a little study of the Placement
Center and growing out of that was a recommendation that there be open advertising.
And ultimately that got to the authorities and to the counsel and all of the people
who make the decisions and they started placing open ads in Spectra and of course they
were, some people were quite surprised to discover that it’d actually made them money.
So it was always an issue of how many programs we would have and whether they
would be considered ‘scholarly.’ There were times when we were talking about four
or five programs. Now compared to today of course, that’s quite amazing, where you
find all kinds of feminist and feminist scholarship issues scattered throughout all the
divisions and that of course is exactly how it ought to be. But, we had to start with
our own little group and always we’d have meetings at the conference and it was for
the purpose of pushing not only the women who came and providing support to them
but providing a voice in the organization to push the other pieces of the organization
to open up.
And then the Feminist/Women’s Studies Division came along and again I’m hazy on
dates. And by this time Jim Gaudino was the executive secretary and he too was a
real friend of caucuses and he said to us ‘you know you need to do it now because
there’s going to be these new requirements and so forth; it makes sense to have a
Feminist/ Women’s Studies Division. There’s a whole lot of scholarship out there
that now provides for it. We had a meeting at the caucus; talked about it; that
sounded like a good idea.
I remember at the time you talk about a role that somebody has; I had a laptop
at the time; that’s pretty early to have a laptop. We were sitting around in a café
and I whipped out that laptop and they talked and I talked and we typed up some
petitions and some justification and we floated around the conference getting
some petitions placed in front of the Legislative Counsel. I think we did it all in
a single conference.
One of the reasons I think I’ve been relatively successful is that I’ve always said
‘well it’d be nice if the rules said we could do this but if not we’ll do it anyway
and then we’ll see what we can do with it’ so I’ve always been a little bit of an
outlaw in that respect. Not, you know capable of following the rules when they’re
to our advantage but capable of deciding we need to change the rules if we do and
push it to help get it done.
So that’s a kind of very long answer to your question but it gets around some the
motivations. When we formed the division our idea was that the caucus would
remain focused on professional kinds of concerns. By that we of course mean
women’s placement, women’s employment, women’s advancement balancing
work and family, all of the professional concerns that affect everybody actually
but especially women in having a scholarly, academic life. The scholarly issues,
the academic study would be what the focus of the division would be.
Q: How have the original goals developed, changed, or evolved?
[Evolved] That’s right, that exactly right. [We’ve] evolved because feminist
scholarship is now significant and while there are still institutions you do hear
on a too regular basis women or men even who do scholarship on feminist issues
or use a feminist approach to things and they’ll have a tenure committee or a
promotion committee that looks askance at that. So it’s not that those issues
have gone away; we still don’t have as many tenured full professors who are
women as we have tenured full professors who are men. Of course the whole
issue of not just women’s issues, but people of all kinds of ethnicities have to
struggle, and in some ways struggle worse in the association now than some
women. And the whole professional advancement; it’s the same in the outside
world as it is in the academy; discrimination hasn’t gone away but it’s gone
underground. And therefore it is less overt.
Q: Where would you like to see the division and caucus go from here?
I don’t have a sense of dissatisfaction with what we’ve done or the directions
that we have taken. I would like for us to simply, keep it up. The professional
concerns are still there. They are somewhat different. If there’s anything I would
like for us to do that we haven’t done, is not something we haven’t done for want
of working on it, it’s just the difficulty of getting it done and that is we all know
how sex, class, race, ethnicity, and other factors, ability, sexual orientation, etc.,
all are engaged, involved in this interacting, intersecting matrix. Our groups don’t
do enough intersecting, interacting work. This is not to say we haven’t cooperated
and worked together, both the African-American division and the Gay-Lesbian caucus,
the various other caucuses and study groups, division groups but as each group has its
own concerns and all of us as individuals have limited time because after all we all
have full-time jobs back at our institutions, dealing with our joint concerns is always
there.
We attend each other’s sessions, we do joint-sponsored sessions. But if there’s anything
I’d like for us to do a whole lot better, it’s that, it’s attending to that issue. But the
whole need for continuing to bolster the legitimacy and the quality of feminist
research, the whole need for paying attention to professional issues so that, I mean,
the structure of the organization, just like the structure of the academy, just like the
structure of the world is, well the United States world, of our western world in which
this organization exists is still patriarchal. It’s not friendly to women and you have to
keep the pressure on to keep from backsliding. And so, we have to keep doing that
professional stuff. And the scholarship; we’ve just scratched the surface of all of the
kinds of feminist scholarship that can be done. So I want us to keep doing the same
thing, more of it better. That would include one place where I think we have not
succeeded anywhere as well as we have in the other area is the inter-group issues,
concerns, and attention
Q: What else should our membership know?
The only thing, it’s just that it’s always a great story and so many people don’t know
it, is (two things actually now that I think about it) one of the things that a number of
women who have been involved in the, I guess you’d say top leadership of the
association, women presidents have been working on or continuing to work on a
publication both electronic and paper that tells the story, that resurrects the
stories of women in leadership in the association.
Go to the NCA Women Leaders Project and we have this little bit of an introduction
and then we have the list of people who have been president and then about each
president we have a little sort of self-told story. And of course it continues to
change because we get more people who need to go into this. So it is in progress
and it will continue to be. The way I refer to us is of the twentieth century there
were eleven. When we started working on this project there were six of us not yet
dead and there were five that already were. The publication is to include the
twentieth century presidents’ stories, if and when it ever gets out. One of the things
I wanted us to do was to get this electronic because it doesn’t have to wait, you find
an error you can correct it, you can add to it. So that’s a neat little thing that
people should know about.
Then the other thing that people ought to know and I don’t know whether this is
the place or time for it is if we look at this list of women, I was president number 7.
This is in 1981. We’d been in existence sixty some years at that time. And from
one perspective that’s not very many women. On the other hand if you were to
compare us to the American Historical Society, the American Psychological Society,
some of those other old long time big big names, it’s a lot probably. And that’s part
of the next process.
Part of the very interesting story would be if you look at those early women, I mean
there was Marie Hochmuth Nichols, she was one of these by anybody’s standards,
male or female, she walked on water. One of the other women of that time was
Maud May Babcock. Nobody’s heard of today unless they go to the University of
Utah. She was that kind. Then everybody else sort of was every ten years and it
was sort of like a token and then I broke the pattern. I came along in 81 and then
we have Beverly Whitaker Long in 85, Patti Gillespie in 86, actually 87 was her
election but somebody died so she took over early. Then Sharon Ratliff; we had
a bit of a dry spell 95 before she got in then 97 was Trent and then Pearson. Then
we have a string. Then we have Engleberg, Watson in a row so there’s certainly a
change over time.
A lot of it is what was happening but the story of my election is a particularly
interesting one because I was never nominated by the powers that be. Mine
was a running campaign. It’s a fascinating one because it has to do with, I
mean it’s kind of, it’s one of those representative examples that shows how you
put together a voice that won’t be shut-up, allies who are helpful and in this
case I always said I owed my election to three guys named Bob. One of them
was Bob Hall, and one was Bob Kibler who’s not with us anymore, and one
was Bob Jeffery who lots of people would never think of. The story explains
what that was but the reason it’s relevant as I said is it shows somebody who’s
willing to speak-up and I was that, I was a person who that wouldn’t shut-up.
I remember one time saying to somebody ‘don’t patronize me’. And having allies
and taking advantage of your opportunities when they come along because this
never would’ve happened if it hadn’t been that the old boy’s network overreached
and they set up an election that was very clearly a set up. And so it made other
people angry as well. And so we took advantage of it. I think its rightfully
considered as a kind of watershed because of not only the fact that I was president,
in fact probably not even the fact that I was president but how it happened and
the way it sort of energized all of us who were involved in the process.
We hope Professor Taylor’s words have been energizing and her inspiration continues
to fuel each of us as we work toward increased representation of women and minorities
in our national association.
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Last Updated September 13, 2006