This year marks the 50-year anniversary of the Women’s Center at the University of Idaho. To celebrate its anniversary, history and the people who founded it, the Women’s Center hosted several informative events throughout the year.
The final celebratory event was a virtual panel on April 19 with some of the women who founded the women’s center.
“It started when we saw the student dropout rates,” said Kay Keskinen, former ITS employee at UI. “Dropout rates for men were 3% and 52% for women.” She, along with other female faculty members at the university, thought this was because women weren’t treated equally to men.
In 1972, UI President Ernest Hartung appointed a committee to study the rates of harrying of women students. The committee included other issues affecting women on campus, including the number of women in faculty ranks, promotion and pay scales.
Those interested in the committee’s work, known as the Women’s Caucus, would meet once a week. Members were frustrated that no action was being taken against inequity issues and a small group called the Core Group formed and pushed for action to be taken.
“We were sitting around in the (women’s) caucus and talking about things that we thought were important,” said Lindy High, one of the nine people who signed the conciliation agreement that pushed the opening of the Women’s Center.
One such topic was the campus environment for students. When the Women’s Center first opened, female students didn’t have a lot of women role models because of a lack of women employees in higher education, UI included. High, along with everyone else who signed the Conciliation Agreement, wanted female students to have more people to look up to while in school.
“When asked why I wanted to sign the agreement, I wanted to say, ‘because the whole world is a man’s center,’” said High.
Many fields of work were male-dominated in the 1970s, so the signers of the agreement wanted to create a place at the university where women could come together and talk about things.
“We wanted to create a space to speak about issues that women were facing,” said Anne Hutchins Tatum, another signer of the Conciliation Agreement. One such issue was unequal treatment and pay for women faculty members.
Hutchins Tatum is proud of the strength that the Women’s Center has found through the years and the move toward equality between staff and faculty members.
When the Women’s Center first opened, it was completely run by volunteers instead of having a dedicated staff. This was the case for a few years after its opening. The 1974 Conciliation Agreement mandated a full-time center with staff, including a full-time, permanent director.
One thing that the founders feared when signing the agreement was being “at risk for pointing out the lack of support for women,” said conciliation agreement cosigner Jo Ramaker. They were worried about having to sue the school because faculty wouldn’t like that they were speaking out against the gender pay gap and mistreatment of women faculty members.
Ramaker added that she wanted people to “be able to see beyond what just is – to see what should be.” She is happy to see all the work that the Women’s Center has done over the years.
Cosigner of the conciliation agreement Barbara Bradley Petura also wanted to make a difference. She got involved because she grew up around other women who went to college and wanted to advance rights, so she was naturally drawn to the Women’s Center.
The women who signed the conciliation agreement wanted to make a change for women at UI – and that’s exactly what they did.
Vanessa Werner can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @VanessaRWerner