coordinator’s corner

We’re beginning another new year! It’s always good to see friends that we haven’t seen for a while, students, staff and faculty alike. We are offering some excellent classes, including Tom Kuehl’s and Brenda Kowalewski’s Intro class, Eva Szalay’s Research Methodologies and the class Becky Johns and I are teaching , Women and the LDS Church. Cross-listed classes include Nancy Haanstad’s Third World Women, Roy VanOrman’s Ethnicity and Older Women, Maria Parrilla’s Psychology of Women, and Kathy Herndon’s Middle-Eastern Women Writers.

The big event of Fall Semester is the Women’s Studies 10^th Anniversary celebration here at Weber State University, which will occur from October 1 through October 7. The committee has been working most of this year putting together an excellent set of activities. We hope you can support many of them and that you will encourage your friends, students, neighbors and everyone to attend these events. We have not one but two internationally known scholars as key note speakers. October 1 Mary Daly will speak at 11:30 in the Special Collections Room of the library. Her topic is a radical feminist analysis of genetic engineering. On Oct. 5 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will speak (also at 11:30 in Special Collections) about "Disappearing Indians and Runaway Wives: Finding History in a Woodsplint Basket." Other events include alumni and founding mothers panels, a double feature video sponsored by our student group FUN, and our annual picnic on Sunday Oct. 7. Look for the full schedule of events on our website (weber.edu/womenstudies) and plan to attend as many as you can.

in recognition

Welcome back to campus Dr. Brenda Marsteller-Kowalewski, who spent last Spring semester "mothering: her new son, and during the summer she had her teaching resource for sociologists interested in Service Learning published by the American Sociologists Association. A job-well-done to her and also to executive council member Dr. Shirley Leali who presented Self Esteem and Incarcerated Youth with Rich Kautz to the Eighth International Literacy & Education Research Network Conference on Learning in Spetses, Greece in July, and Gracia Roemer who presented Looksism in the Workplace to the Feminist Task Force of the American Library Association this summer. Gracia was also interviewed, along with WS graduate Heather Harris, by the Standard Examiner for an article on Barbie.

Congratulations to Dr. Forrest C. Crawford who received this year’s Distinguished Career Service Award from the Alumni Association of the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Utah, and to Dr. Bill McVaugh who is this year’s John S. Hinckley award recipient.

Congratulations also to recent WS graduate Oliva Meikle, her husband Matthew, and their newborn Joseph Brent Meikle, who arrived on June 13.

Daughter of Fortune

Over the summer, the Women’s Studies reading group read and discussed Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune. This historical novel takes place in the time of the gold rush, where the high spirited young heroine flees her homeland of Chile in search of her gold-fever struck lover in California but instead, disguised as a man, finds freedom and adventure seldom known to women of her era.

The reading group will meet again on Sept. 14, 3:30 p.m., at Grounds For Coffee on Harrison to discuss Susan Faludi’s Stiffed. Faludi finds that even in the world they supposedly own and run, men are at the mercy of cultural forces that disfigure their lives and destroy their chance at happiness.

FUN notes

FUN notes