Head Of UB Women’s Studies Program Says Progress Slow As Women Strive “To Claim Their Own Voice”

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Isabel Marcus has been championing the rights of women since the mid-1950s. And while time would seem to be on the side of progress, the director of the Women's Studies Program at the University at Buffalo says women still are striving to claim their own voice in the 21st century.

This voice -- which Marcus says "is not just a reproduction of a male voice, but one that carries its own (statement)" -- is often silent, or silenced, in the classroom.

"I still think this is a society where women have to get permission or be given permission to speak," says Marcus, who also is co-director of the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (IREWG) at UB and a professor in the UB Law School.

"Part of my life's commitment has been to thinking…that 40 years from the time I graduated high school (and) college until now would have been times of dramatic change, (change) which would be institutionalized and articulated and empathized with and recognized and rewarded. Rewarded," she says incredulously, laughing ironically.

But the rewards are not as great as one might imagine.

"To see 40 years later how much of a backlash there is, I just find it extraordinary," she says.

A backlash, for example, in which women have placed themselves in secondary roles, most notably during the recent presidential campaigning.

"It is astonishing that most of the wives of the candidates for the president of the United States try to out-position themselves as traditional housewives," she says. "I find this utterly astonishing."

Marcus, who taught the first-ever "women in politics" course as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968, tosses out yet another bone of contention about the political arena.

"I think The New York Times the other day had a story about John McCain's wife, in which he characterized her most important job as keeping him under control, and I thought to myself, 'this is really astonishing,'" she says, exasperated for the moment.

"I'm not despairing, but it gives one pause to thing about (the slowness of) social change."

Marcus, who attended Barnard College in New York City in the 1950s, considers herself "part of a whole generation of women who came to the realization that we had to rethink who we were and what we were doing and how we were doing it.

"We were constantly confronting our male peers, who we thought were our colleagues and our friends, having to remind them that we had an equal contribution to make and that equality was not just a slogan, but that it had to be lived," she says.

Marcus stresses the importance of continuing to raise this consciousness through action.

"The way in which faculty who are not sensitive to gender issues confirm the worst fears and anxieties in students is really striking and it's easy to do," she says. However, what goes on outside the classroom is tantamount to empowering women. For students -- undergraduates in particular -- Marcus says, campus groups must continue to broach such issues as dating violence and sexual harassment, and boost participation.

"I understand it's hard to do; on the other hand, the failure to…raise these questions" is the greater tragedy, she says.

Marcus recalled a visit to Colby College in Maine in the early 1990s, during which the women on campus had undertaken a project to expose the writing on the wall -- the men's bathroom stall walls, that is.

"The women copied down on butcher paper all the things that were in the men's stalls and posted them in the student union," she says. Not that she's suggesting such action, she says, but the demonstration reveals the ways in which women are excluded from certain spaces and the difficulties they encounter in integrating such spaces.

The issue of space figures largely into the discussion about violence against women. On a trip to Germany, Marcus was introduced to a group of radical feminists who were interested in investigating what would happen if a dusk curfew were imposed on all men. They wanted to see how many women would be on the street who normally would be afraid.

"Their premise was that no woman would be afraid to go out on the street if she knew that there would not be males around who could assault," says Marcus, who is currently working on a book investigating violence against women in Poland, Russia, Romania and Hungary. The feminists' exercise was meant to better understand a place in which women's fears and anxieties were very real.

"What does that say about how profound questions of violence against women are?" she asks.

Now in her 60s, Marcus says she's prepared to pass the torch in order to give someone else the opportunity to make a difference. She says it's important to introduce younger successors into the fold in order to keep the discourse fresh.

"I think there is a moral obligation to mentor younger women," she says, emphasizing the need not only in Women's Studies, but within the university as a whole "to teach and impart reasoning and thinking through issues (so) that (women) know how to be rigorous and disciplined in their reasoning."