ABOUT ABBY
Abby is a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies. She has a Ph.D in Psychology from Harvard University. She is currently doing research on longitudinal studies of educated women's lives and personalities, and interventions on gender and science and technology with middle-school-aged girls, undergraduates, and faculty. Abby teaches classes about activism and inclusion in workplace and academic settings.
The decision to major in Women’s Studies was very personal to me. I had qualms about declaring the major, simply because I anticipated the strange looks I would get when I was asked the same questions all college students are asked. I considered other majors, like anthropology or history, that would allow me to study people and oppression more discreetly. But I felt so passionately about the cause, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about the feminist movement in its various forms, and I knew I needed to be intentional about that. I declared Women’s Studies as my second major, on International Women’s Day of 2017, and that felt like the biggest indication I could have asked for that it was the right choice. Like Abby, no one challenged me, but it wasn’t as easily accepted as my English major. And when Women’s Studies became my primary focus, when I started studying literature by and about feminists and other activists, strange looks were inevitable and explanations were necessary. From Abby's experience to mine, there has been a slow normalization of feminism in academia, but it's still very political. That is not likely to change, and maybe it shouldn't.
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When Abby said this to me at the end of our interview, I realized that difference is pretty liberating as a young adult. There’s less pressure to conform, there are more options. I have no shortage of female role models that are active today and who were powerful throughout history. Representation is, of course, still a problem, but that situation will be hugely different in even the very next generation. And Abby’s last line is really powerful because I began wondering what kind of things will change through our efforts in the next generation that we weren’t necessarily trying to accomplish, and I hope it is just as liberating. My work is absolutely for future generations, because that is the level on which the most changes can be made.
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"When I was a kid, my mother used to always say, when there was a writing assignment, “why don’t you write about a woman?” I think every time I did that, I had a small click moment. It pushed me to ask that question, “what about a woman?” Then when I was a junior or senior in college, I was sitting on the steps of the Psych Department, reading one of three books that came out that year that were all huge feminist arguments: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. I read those three books in a pretty short amount of time, and after whichever one came third, I thought, 'Okay, this is it, I want to be like them.'"
"When I decided to do my honors thesis on women, no one challenged me, but it was unusual. Then I did the same thing in graduate school, I chose to study women, and I felt very strongly about it. The psychology literature on women really emphasized that women were defined by their family situation, which drove me crazy as an idea. It was very personal. It is somewhat true, so my dissertation really struggled with thinking about that, how to decide how that is both true and untrue. By then it was clear that I was operating on the margins of psychology, that whatever I was doing, it wasn’t mainstream. It was always focused, usually on women, but specifically on justice and social structure issues, which psychologists at that time never thought about. They still mostly don’t."
"When you’re young you think things will change faster than they do. My own field has changed hugely. When I first started working on STEM fifteen years ago, it was a shock to me. I actually walked around saying, “It’s like the 1970s in these science departments.” It’s less so now, there’s a more vocal resistance. I would like to not have to persuade students still that gender is an issue. I do have to say, lots of conservative people thought this would happen fast. Lots of deans would say to me, “Well, we won’t even have Women’s Studies in five years.” I didn’t believe that. It seemed to me the world wasn't likely to change that fast. But I did think more would change more quickly."
"How far we’ve come is always a background knowledge for us because it was visceral, we were there. For you, of course you know that it was different, but I think there is a difference between having experienced it and having not. I think, I hope, that difference is mostly liberating. You are not as weighed down by those stigmatizing and self-limiting representations as we were. Some are still out there, but they are not the only images out there. There is more to go to for positive images of independent female lives. I think that’s important. I don’t want you to think I’m saying we have a more accurate view, I don’t think that. I think we just have a different perspective. That can produce tension sometimes across the generations. But for me, anyway, I feel happy to see women who are less weighed down by all that. That was a positive outcome I didn't quite understand we were looking for."
Whenever I would write or talk about feminism in high school, it was always met with comments like this. They’d say “things are as good as they’re going to get,” or “it’ll be over soon enough, so just let it go.” But they weren’t paying attention to why things were happening as they were, they just accepted it. A lot of people do just accept that things aren’t fair and they want everyone to just expect things to be unfair. That seems like a really hopeless mindset to me. I’ve seen what changes can be made, and they work when executed correctly. Companies have reached gender parity, and entire countries made policies to end child marriages and gendered violence. There’s evidence and statistics about unfairness and it can be fixed if enough people care to do something. These issues are going to be around for a while, and I want to do something. It would be wonderful if Women’s Studies was obsolete in five years because everything magically got better, but I think anyone who pays attention knows that that won’t be the case. Hopefulness is evident across generations of feminists, but I think we've also had to be very realistic about how much time and energy these changes require of us.
I read so much as a child, which was encouraged mostly by one teacher in elementary school and one later on in middle school. I liked reading books about strong female characters, so they would find those for me. I read about girls and women who were brave and smart and kind, and I emulated them. When I wrote my own stories, they were about girls like this, and these characters were prime examples of strength in my young mind. My interests started to include women writers and their life stories, which often had those elements of bravery, intelligence, and kindness. Then it was Feminist Literature that I was drawn to, and I realized that their bravery and intelligence and kindness were apparent despite prevalent oppression, and they became even more important to me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be like these women. Now I identify with them, and want to write like them as well. Writing has always been a major platform for activism, and for sharing ideas to anyone who may be interested. Across generations, the power of writing has not changed.