Thirty something (more or less)

• In 1968, a group of feminists went to Atlantic City to protest the Miss America pageant. The group originally intended to burn symbols of oppression in a “Freedom Trash Can” but were unable to secure a fire permit.

• Both the women’s movement of the 1970s and the implementation of Title VII helped propel women’s studies as an academic discipline. IU South Bend was the first IU campus to offer a women’s studies course.

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar met at IU’s Bloomington campus in 1974, where they taught a course on female literary tradition, a tradition they would help to identify as well as to define internationally. Their first literary collaboration was The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, a runner-up for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• By 1966, Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, which had begun as a survey of her Smith College cronies and their degrees of fulfillment from marriage and motherhood, had sold more than 3 million copies. That same year, the National Organization for Women was founded. Friedan was the first president.

• Sylvia Bowman, an English professor at IPFW, was appointed IU’s first woman chancellor in 1971.

• An Equal Rights Amendment, originally written in 1921 by suffragist Alice Paul, had been introduced in Congress every session since 1923 and was passed in 1972, but was not ratified by the necessary 38 states by a July 1982 deadline. Thirty-five states had ratified the amendment.

• The Indiana Commission for Higher Education approved a new IU bachelor of arts degree in gender studies to be offered on the Bloomington campus, beginning with the fall 1997 semester. Courses in gender studies would be taught through the Women’s Studies Program, which had been part of the College of Arts and Sciences since the early 1970s. The new degree was titled “gender studies” instead of “women’s studies” because the curriculum provided students with an understanding of ways in which gender issues involve not only the study of women, but the study of men, families, organizations, economies, science, sports, leisure, religion and many other areas relevant to future careers of graduates. Until that time, IPFW had been the only institution in the state that offered a bachelor of arts degree in women’s studies.

• Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble turned 12 years old in 2002. One point of the book, which would become a standard text reading in gender studies classes, was “not to prescribe a new gendered way of life, but to open up the field of possibility for gender,” wrote Butler.