Center for the Study of Women in Society

A 1970 study, "The Status of Women at the University of Oregon", reported that women represented only 10.5% of full-time, 9-month teaching faculty. According to Joan Acker, one of the faculty writing the study, they requested the university develop an affirmative action plan. The plan was only developed, however, after the passage of Title IX in 1972, when it was required of institutions accepting US$50,000 or more in federal aid. At that time, a small Women's Research and Study Center was funded by a research grant from the Office of Scholarly Research in the Graduate School. Despite statewide budget cuts to education funding, the university supported a women's congress called Women on the Move during the last half of June 1972. The congress "helped energize feminists of all kinds at the University to push for greater change in the decade to come", and led to a proposal for an interdisciplinary women's studies center at the university. During that same period, the university's Acquisitions Librarian Edward Kemp had been acquiring manuscripts related to women's roles in society as leaders, writers, and artists. He became interested in the papers of a feminist and writer, the late Jane Grant, a co-founder of The New Yorker, and wife of William B. Harris, an editor at Fortune magazine. Kemp wrote a note of inquiry to Harris, and met with him in New York. Harris indicated that he was interested in making a bequest, and after his death, the Harris-Grant 1983 bequest amounted to US$3.5 million, a record at the time for the largest donation to the university from a single donor. == Expanded mission and programming ==

The mission of the Center was expanded in 1983 "to reflect its broader mission to generate, support, and disseminate research on women" and it was renamed the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS). The bequest made possible annual awards totaling US$100,000 "to support research by faculty and graduate students", as well as "visiting scholars, conferences and course planning". By the late 1980s, CSWS had cooperative projects with the art museum, the women's studies curriculum, and the campus library's special collections. With the UO development fund, CSWS also established grants for women of color and graduate students studying women. == History ==

Cheris Kramarae, CSWS director in the late 1980s, cited a wide variety of work that the Center contributed to during that period : ... a film about women migrant workers and the dangers of pesticides; the lives of Macedonian (Gypsy) women; ecofeminism; lesbians as metaphor in women's literature; the economy of prostitution in East Asia; violence in the lives of low-income black women; prenatal care for low-income women; children's health; housing for battered women; women's access to public office and financial credit; and AIDS education in Africa. Research interest groups that CSWS established during the 1990s included initiatives in feminist humanities, "wired" humanities, and women's health and aging. By 2009, funding from CSWS for faculty and graduate research in more than 20 departments had totaled more than US$2 million. A member of the National Council for Research on Women, CSWS is one of the oldest women's research centers in the United States. == References ==