2008 Woodie Awards
Female voices grow through campus projects
Jean Patteson ; The Orlando Sentinel (KRT)
Issue date: 3/30/05 Section: News
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ORLANDO, Fl. - T-shirts of every hue wave like flags from lines strung along the breezeways on the University of Central Florida's Brevard campus.
This is not washday. It is the Clothesline Project, an event held periodically on UCF campuses to raise awareness about violence against women.
Each T-shirt is a signal of anguish or outrage. Each bears a hand-lettered message from a woman in the community: "Victim." "Survivor." "You don't deserve my tears." And heartbreakingly: "R.I.P. Baby Lei. Killed by your granddaddy."
Each shirt also is a bold, bright sign that feminism is alive and well.
"People think there's no reason for feminism anymore," says Lisa Logan, director of women's studies programs and associate professor of English on the Orlando campus. "They think we've achieved gender equality."
Not so, she says. Many women's issues remain unresolved, and feminism is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s and `70s, the tumultuous heyday of the women's liberation movement.
Even on UCF's conservative campus, feminists are a small but increasingly visible and vocal minority_thanks in part to the women's studies program, its emphasis on activism, and its dynamic director.
INSPIRATION ON ISSUES
"Many members of the women's studies faculty inspired and motivated me," says Emily Ruff, 23, a leading campus activist.
"There's a lot of work to be done in areas that white, educated, middle-class women take for granted," she says, including workplace inequality, body-image issues, child care and health care.
On campuses across the country, student feminism is on the rise, says Paula Krebs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and a founding editor of the journal Feminist Teacher. And increasingly, women of color are joining the movement, along with small numbers of men.
"Especially at more conservative-identified institutions, feminist activists are finding their voices as they increasingly notice that a conservative political and social agenda is undermining women's gains, which has direct consequences for their own freedoms," says Krebs.
The focus on women's issues raised during last year's elections galvanized students to engage in feminist causes, says Elena Di Lapi, director of the Penn Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Those issues included reproductive freedom, gay rights and violence against women in war.
More recently, the firestorm over Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers' comments that innate gender factors might explain the scarcity of women in science prompted a fresh examination of feminist issues, says Ana Maria Garcia, director of women's studies at Arcadia University in Philadelphia.