Taking Action and Finding Peace

This post is the third in a series of posts honoring Women’s Legacy Month. Check out Case Studies & News to read the others. 

Ivy Schweitzer is a professor of English and Creative Writing]at Dartmouth College and three-time chair of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Ivy authored two]books, many articles and several edited collections,]and now publishes in the digital humanities— her projects include the Occom Circle project, the White Heat blog and most recently HomeWorks. She is the producer of It’s Criminal, a documentary about a course she co-taught featuring incarcerated women and Dartmouth students. She was the 2013 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Early Americanists and she has two poetry manuscripts in the works. She has taught at every level of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program for over 30 years.

I spoke with Ivy to learn about the issues facing women in our world today. 

How did you become interested in teaching Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies? 

It’s such an interesting question, because of course I wasn’t trained in that field. When I started to teach at Dartmouth in 1983, what was then called the Women’s Studies program was relatively new. I arrived in a new place, with a new job, newly divorced, and I looked around for my people, my intellectual home. I got involved with a group of women who were setting up a faculty seminar called the Feminist Inquiry seminar. These were mostly women who had tenure, and I really looked up to them.  They had started the first Women’s Studies program in the Ivy League in 1978. It was the 80s, they were the coolest people, I really wanted to be in that club.  

I didn’t really know much about Women’s Studies. So I started to sit in on the courses.  I remember sitting in on the intro course, Women’s Studies 10, and then the theory course, Women’s Studies 15, and then my friend Carla and I sat in on Women in the Renaissance.  I was educating myself in the field. Then someone said to me, you’ve sat in on Women’s Studies 10, would you like to teach it? At that time it was team taught. And I learned it well enough to teach it. And since then, I have taught every level of course in what is now called the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program— intro, theory, intermediate seminars and senior seminars. But I really got into it because I was emulating these women who were teaching outside of their fields and their departments. And then it became my intellectual home at Dartmouth— the place I really felt comfortable, a sense of belonging, and a desire to put my energy into that program. 

I believe I am the only person who has chaired that program 3 times. When I started, it was set up as a team-chairing, so the junior person would learn chairing from the senior person, and then pass that knowledge along. The senior chair during my first term was Susanne Zantop. She was a wonderful, funny, wry, accomplished, generous person, and it was a profound experience watching her use administration as a tool for equity. I’ve taught others how to chair the program during my time. As chair I had a chance to make hires, mentor junior and associate professors, and support a collaboration with a university in Kosovo, which was sending visitors over to take classes and learn from how we operate.  

Image Credit: TEDX Dartmouth

How many students would you guess you’ve taught in Women and Gender Studies? What did you hope they would walk away with? 

I’ve taught 2-3 classes in the program a year for 30 years, so about 1500-2000 students. Included in that group were the comedian Mindy Kaling (who was hilarious in college) and Heid E. Erdrich, a notable Native poet. Of course, over all those years I’ve evolved my curriculum substantially as I contemplated this very question. 

I really wanted my students to see the world in a different way as a result of their courses. I wanted to raise consciousness about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a gendered person in our society. I wanted my students to notice what the power dynamics are. I wanted them to ask, “what is another way of approaching the world?” I wanted to change the way people lived their lives. I wanted to affect their hearts, their identity, how they moved through the world. 

Students would come to me in the last part of fall term and say, “You’ve ruined my Thanksgiving! Now that I’ve taken this class, I couldn’t sit at the dinner table and watch my parents interact without totally freaking out and remembering everything you’ve taught about gender dynamics.”  And that’s what I wanted, frankly. 

I would summarize the takeaways from my classes as the “both/and.” The world is not a zero-sum game, it’s not you lose, I win.  We have to break the binary and see the world in a different way. I think that would change so much of what’s problematic with the world. You can be right and I can be right, you can be good and I can be good. They can be different types of rights and goods. In many ways there are not limited resources.  And even in the scenarios where they are limited, like natural resources, if we husband our resources well they can really last us.  The takeaway from Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies is that we can live in economies of abundance, not scarcity and precarity. 

A lot of people might say that message goes against the academy. I wish somebody had told me that when you get into the academy and you don’t fit in and you’re uncomfortable, that it’s not your problem, it’s the problem of the academy. Don’t let it make you feel like you’re lesser or you don’t deserve to be there. I wish someone had said that to me because the academy has not been a hospitable place for women, feminists, and people of color or activists.

Image Credit: It’s Criminal

Can you give me a short list of the most interesting questions in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies field at the moment? 

I think they’ve both changed over the years and they also haven’t changed. First of all, the program has evolved. We’ve gone from Women’s Studies to Women ‘s and Gender Studies, to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

In the 80s when I first started out it was, “how do we deal with lesbianism?” This was a real thorny set of issues, but in some ways we’ve worked that out. In the 90s the questions turned to racial difference and identity, and that has only deepened.

Now we are working to understand feminism as global.  As we look at domestic violence, political participation, and reproductive rights in our country, we are learning from our sisters in the east, because in a lot of places, women have preceded us in working on these issues. 

An ongoing set of concerns is violence against women, people of color, queer people of color, and trans people.  I think there is a global reckoning going on in terms of race and gender and violence— you can see this in the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies is very concerned with those two issues. BLM is a feminist issue— it was started by three queer women of color. 

Transgender rights are the most extreme test case for our moment.  One of the topics that has risen to the top of the pile is trans politics and the extreme resistance of the right wing. That’s the new frontier. Today, parents who are giving trans therapy to their children in Texas could be charged with child abuse and genital mutilation. It’s crazy making. 

And of course, climate change. Think about Mother Earth— there is a strong field of feminist eco poetics, feminist eco studies. Earth is the maternal figure that holds us all, how do we respond as she faces crises? Of course, all of these issues will become moot if we don’t have a planet to live on. 

 Hearing these questions described, they’re pretty huge. How do you take action and yet find peace? 

That’s a hard question. To have an activist stance and yet find peace is a difficult balance. At Dartmouth, I often felt that I was swimming against the current, and constantly being pushed back.

I think one of the ways to balance it all is to see yourself as part of a larger community, so that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. There are others who can take up the burden when you feel tired, and you can pass the baton.  We don’t have to do everything and we can’t do everything. We are part of a larger community and we are all in it together.

This means getting rid of the model of leadership where there are one or two leaders everyone looks up to, usually charismatic men who are often, then, targets of violence. Instead, it’s about grassroots leadership. When leadership comes from the bottom up, for example, when decarcerated people show us how to fight mass incarceration or the victims of sexual assault show us how to address it, my job as an academic and poet is to facilitate and support that. I have to have humility in the face of what I don’t know and always be learning 

And we all need to have personal lives that are really fulfilling, lives that are connected to our activist lives, community and nature, and also restful and restorative. You surround yourself with people who can both strengthen your conviction and challenge your world view, who both rest you and inspire you. 

And you write poetry about it.