WGSS Chair’s Letter

Yale is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of coeducation in Yale College and the 150th of women in the graduate school.  Commemorative events in September included an outpouring of praise for the late Elga Wasserman, who served 1968-72 as the Yale president’s “special assistant on the education of women and chairman of the committee on coeducation.”  At the time, there were just two tenured women on the faculty, no women served as deans, and Yale was a place of exclusive white male privilege.  Just as the original mission of the Women’s Studies Program (founded in 1979) was never just to study women, so Wasserman’s vision extended far beyond the admission of a few hundred women to Yale.  In the words of Sam Chauncey, who worked alongside her, she sought to fundamentally change the university by “making all of Yale coeducational in every sense of the word.”  Coeducation in 1969 was an important step in a process that remains unfinished today: that of making Yale an educational institution that fosters equality, diversity, and social justice.  The WGSS Program annually celebrates Wasserman’s memory with an undergraduate prize; as scholars, teachers, and students, we continue the work she envisioned.

In fall 2019 WGSS welcomes the arrival of two distinguished faculty members: Professor Susan Stryker, Presidential Visiting Fellow (for 2019-20) and Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona; and Professor Roderick Ferguson, who will become Chair of WGSS in January 2020.  Both are teaching much-needed new courses that you can read about in this newsletter.  We also welcome visiting international scholars Sine Plambech and Mateusz Krol; and we welcome Ellen Cupo, our new Senior Administrative Assistant. 

Great thanks go to Ellen, to Moe Gardner, to Linda Relyea, to Keith Geriak, and to our student worker Kelly Tran for bringing their creativity and dedication to our shared work every day.  Thank you to Patricia Ekpo and Jacinda Tran for organizing an exciting series of workshops and talks by faculty and graduate students; and to Evren Savci for creating this year’s WGSS lecture series.  To Joe Fischel, DGS, and to Andrew Dowe, DUS: unending thanks for the work you do to support and inspire our students.