About Women

Prof. Ruth Perry is co-founder of the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies — the first educational experiment of its kind in the United States.

It’s a project where women’s studies scholars at nine Boston-area universities develop cross-disciplinary subjects.

It’s amazing,” Perry says. “Somebody getting a Ph.D. in history, political science, or Spanish literature might take a class given by an anthropologist and an expert in 18th-century British literature. And the questions that come up — and how you approach them — are intellectually challenging for everybody. It’s just brain sizzling.

“There’s no other city in America where faculty have this opportunity,” she adds, “and no where else in the country where grad students can take classes with professors from different institutions in all those disciplines.”

The idea of the Consortium is to advance understanding of the difference that gender makes in the construction of knowledge and to educate the next generation of women scholars — both men and women. All courses speak about race, class, global location, and policy implications. The project was at Radcliffe for more than a decade, but recently moved to MIT.

The Consortium offers team-taught subjects across disciplines with faculty from MIT, Boston College, Brandeis, Harvard, Northeastern, Tufts, UMass Boston, Simmons, and Boston University. All courses are intended to engage students in developing new knowledge for the world.

It all began nearly 20 years ago as a conversation around Ruth Perry’s kitchen table with her friends in women’s studies at other institutions, who all agreed that there was a need to advance interdisciplinary graduate education and to continue to create new scholarship on women. The original women founders, all educators in women’s studies, nicknamed themselves the Mother Board, which still exists today.

HOW IT WORKS

Four courses are taught each year at MIT, two a semester. The courses often get repeated once, but not more than that. Each course is taught with at least one scholar from another discipline.

“One benefit to MIT students is that it’s convenient; they can take the courses without leaving campus. Also, MIT gains the benefit of faculty from all the other schools who participate in teaching these remarkable classes, while the beauty of the Consortium for faculty is that you teach at the cutting-edge of your intellectual interests,” says Perry, a literature professor.

“It’s a collaborative model that saves all institutions’ resources because it makes use of the intellectual riches of an area,” she says. The Board makes intellectual decisions about the Consortium and each member is a volunteer.

“The reason the Consortium can be run so cheaply is that everybody on that board is doing it out of love.”

RAISED A FEMINIST

On this day, Ruth Perry is saying that she is a third generation feminist.

“My grandmother was the first steward in her shop of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and my mother was on the picket line before she was old enough to walk.”

When Perry went to graduate school in the late 1960s, she was already a feminist, more on the vanguard of the women’s movement than simply influenced by it. She took a risk as a single mother on welfare when she went to graduate school at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1969; on that campus, she studied literature and taught its first women’s studies course ever. In 1973, she joined the MIT faculty, and a decade later, she founded MIT’s Women’s Studies Program.

For the past 19 years, she has been involved in the Consortium in addition to her work in 18th century British literature. But more recently, her interests have moved into another area.

A folk singer since she was 12, her latest interest is the history of collecting and preserving folk music, which began in Europe in the 18th century. She now not only sings unaccompanied ballads, but writes about them and studies them as an intellectual discipline. “It’s great,” she says. “Folklore and folk music are a new direction for 18th century studies.”

She says the project has been a rich teacher. “The best way to do anything difficult,” she adds, “is to do it with friends. Instead of being drained, you get energy from them and it really feeds your work.”

by Liz Karagianis

On Topic: faculty, women