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2010 marks the 40th anniversary of the Women's Studies Department at San Diego State. This
department was actually the first women's studies department in the nation and ultimately
the world.
So, we're very proud of that accomplishment and we are doing the best we can to put on
a great party and bring back the fervor of the movement. Not only are we planning events,
but we're planning to have this historical presentation to go along with those events.
So, when we bring people to campus, we want them to know how old our department is and
how historically altering it was for SDSU as well as the rest of the nation.
Here, at Special Collections at San Diego State library, I have found absolute gems
in the university newspapers as well as things that have been saved by the department.
The Daily Aztecs and the photos and the coverage of the popular cultural contextualization
kind of show what was going on back in the late 1960s and '70s.
Their approach to women students was to call them co-eds. So, right there, you have that
distinguishing label and it puts women on the margin and also there's ads for wedding
rings and very sexist connotations to articles. There was a Miss Mini-skirt contest that went
through the '60s and '70s. That was a major focus for female representation in the Daily
Aztec. There wasn't female sports being covered, there wasn't female student organizations.
It was this very beauty pagent-oriented conceptualization of femininity, and, yeah, I noticed that right
away.
It's amazing how different that era was for women and it kind of is enraging, but at the
same time knowing that women changed that is also awesome.
I think that looking back to our past and understanding where we came from and our accomplishments
as women's studies students and activists, that will onlly enrich and further our motivation
to continue in that change and forward movement.