The 150 Women Project

This is the framing narrative of the 150w History Project; it defines and explores watershed moments in four sections. Section One :1870s through the Turn of the 19 th Century. Chapter 1 covers the admission of women when the newly opened university was still defining its identity. Chapter 2 describes the 1890s, when students, alumnae, and donors banded together to create a separate system of women’s campus organizations. Chapter 3 narrates UC women’s participation in the 1911 California women’ suffrage campaign and explains its national importance. Section Two: WWI through the 1920s. Chapter 4 is on the impact of WWI in changing gender relations and expectations among the undergraduates; Chapters 5 and 6 describe the arrival of the first cohort of women faculty and their struggle for professional recognition on campus. Section Three: WWII through the 1950s. These chapters describe WWII as the central cause of a rapid increase in women’s academic and leadership opportunities, followed by a sharp drop and lingering postwar decline. Chapter 7 explores the new careers and occupations that war mobilization opened to UC women. Chapter 8 examines the crucial war-time work of the leaders of the all-female student government as well as the exile of Japanese American students and recent graduates to internment camps. Chapters 9 and 10 explain the shrinkage of women’s presence on campus, and their difficulty finding suitable employment once they graduated. The university was also reluctant to hire its own women PhDs, so many were underemployed. Chapter 11 turns to Berkeley’s student movements of the 1960s, which were intertwined with both sexual liberation and civil rights struggles. They prepared the way for the movement led by academic women in the early seventies for nondiscriminatory employment opportunities, which is explored in Chapter 12.

Describes the paths to the Ph.D. and the subsequent careers of the first 15 women to earn Ph.D.s from the University of California. It covers: Milicent Washburn Shinn (1898), Jessica Blanche Peixotto (1900),Alice Robertson (1902), Edna Earl Watson Bailey (1910), Annie Dale Biddle Andrews (1911), Myrtle Elizabeth Johnson (1912), Lillian Ruth Matthews (1912), Emma Phoebe Waterman Haas (1913), Anna Estelle Glancy (1913), Frances Lytle Gillepsy (1914), Rosalind Wulzen (1914), Olga Louise Bridgman (1915), Helen Margaret Gillkey (1915), Olive Swezy (1915), Irene Agnes McCulloch (1916).

Interviews Conducted by Paula Fass and Christina Maslach; Introduction by Fass and Mashlach [505 pages]

Interviewees: Clair Brown, Beth Burnside, Carol Christ, Carol Clover, Galen Cranz, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiona Doyle, Paula Fass, Catherine Gallagher, Jewell Gibbs, Susan Graham, Leanne Hinton, Judith Klinman, Robin Lakeoff, Christina Maslach, Mary Ann Mason, Susan Matisoff, Karlene Roberts, Marjorie Shultz, Eleanor Swift, Ruth Tringham, Bonnie Wade, Marvalee Wake, Rhona Weinstein

Short hilghlighting of pioneer women leaders on the Berkeley campus: Beth Piatote, Christine Hastorf, Constance Chang-Hasnain, Dana Carney, Eileen Lacey, G. Cristina Mora, Gail Brager, Irene Bloemraad, Jill Duerr Berrick, Junko Habu, Laura Pérez, Lauren Kroiz, Leti Volpp, Marla Feller, Mary Power, Mel Chen, Rena Dorph, Rosemary Gillespie, Shafi Goldwasser, Sophie Volpp, Susan Hyde