New Directorship and a New Name
The Women’s Center’s name became a topic of discussion in the late 1980s, as they wanted to emphasize the academic nature of the Center and its resource collection. In a memo from February 1987, Kaplan wrote that the top contenders for the new name were the Barnard Center for Women’s Research “(which is purposely ambiguous about whether the researchers are women or the subject is women)” or Barnard Women’s Resource Collection and Research Center. Later in the year, “the Barnard International Center for Research on Women” was also thrown into the running, the closest draft to what they eventually landed on as the new name: the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
The early 1990s were a time of change and restructuring at the BCRW, and not all of it was positively received. After 20 years of existence, a task force was created in 1991 to examine the future of the Center. In their report from October 2nd, they state: “The Center’s Mission is to promote the dialogue between feminist scholarship and activism, inside and outside the College, which has provided the historic focus of its Collection, public programming, and the Scholar and the Feminist Conference, and from which the Center has earned a national, even international, reputation. In recent years it has made a special effort to integrate people of color into all its activities.” However, facing severe budget cuts, the Center’s future felt precarious to many. In the Fall of 1991, Temma Kaplan resigned and was put on paid faculty leave for a year. The two other full-time staff members at the Center also resigned, and their positions were combined into one in order to save money. Many supporters of the Center, including alumnae, community members, other women’s centers, and even the National Council for Research on Women, wrote to Barnard President Ellen Futter to express their disappointment, dismay, and worry at Temma Kaplan’s apparent dismissal. Leslie Calman ‘74 was appointed the new Director of the Center, starting November 1st, 1991, and ensured the Center’s supporters that she was dedicated to the Center’s goals and mission, and would strive to continue the work that Kaplan had started. In one letter to the editor published in the Barnard Bulletin, she responded to a dramatic article from a previous edition calling the staff changes and budget cuts a “murder” of the Center. Calman reassured the students that the BCRW and its mission were very much alive.
In 1992, Calman initiated a semesterly publication of the goings-on at the Center, called CenterNews, which, while it has shifted form and design, continues to this day. In her Director’s Note in the first edition of CenterNews, from Fall 1992, Calman quoted the Center’s founding charter’s underlying aim “to assure that women can live and work in dignity, autonomy, and equality.” Returning to these words 20 years later, she noted the ways that the BCRW continued to pursue that goal: “by promoting inquiry and advancing knowledge about women; by helping to keep women’s issues at the intellectual forefront of college life; by seeking to increase ties among diverse groups of women; and by reaching out to students, faculty, administrators, alumnae, and women in the community outside of Barnard’s gates.” Reiterating the Center’s dedication to women outside of Barnard, Calman began her time as Director with the goal to bring both feminists and women unfamiliar with or new to feminism into the Center’s community.
With the new millennium came a new director. Janet Jakobsen began as Director of the BCRW in January of 2000, and strove to bring the Center into the new century with her. She pushed the Center to have a strong online presence, and assessed the Resource Collection’s usage and engagement. The Scholar and Feminist Online, BCRW’s online academic journal, launched in 2003.
The Fall of 2001 marked the 30th anniversary of the Center. In November, months after the September 11th attacks, the Center hosted an anniversary dinner at which they recognized the impact of the BCRW’s 30 years of work while solemnly acknowledging that with this momentous event, world politics had shifted. While the celebration dinner and its promotional materials had most likely been in the works well before September, the brochures for this program touched on this 9/11 and its connection to BCRW:
Indeed, the devastating events of 11 September and their aftermath have raised public awareness to many of the issues that have topped the Center’s agenda for the past three decades: women’s rights and human rights, questions of civil liberties, and racial and economic justice in the global perspective. As American citizens are called upon not only to consider the social and historical conditions that enable injustices both domestically and abroad, but also, we would hope, to take action against them, public dialogues must engage these very issues. We all have a greater responsibility than ever to critique the social structures and powers that govern us; it is the Center’s ongoing task to provide a forum for these dialogues.
This recognition of 9/11’s impact continued on into the Spring of 2002: the BCRW cosponsored an event at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality (IRWGS) called “Responding to War,” featuring Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak; the Scholar and Feminist Conference that year was called Public Sentiments: Memory, Trauma, History, Action, focusing on “the Holocaust, American slavery, AIDS, military dictatorship, and the recent 9/11;” and the Center hosted an event featuring Jack Halberstam, who gave a talk on “War/Peace/Conflict/Violence, Performing Gender.”
The BCRW continued to grow under the leadership of Janet Jakobsen. In the academic year 2004-05, a new endowed lectureship began, the Helen Pond McIntyre ‘48 Lecture. The first lecture was given by Catharine Stimpson, first Acting Director of the Women’s Center from 1971-1972. In 2006, Jakobsen began the Spring CenterNews’ Director’s Note with: “Despite the mainstream press’ frequent claims to the contrary, feminism is far from dead.” In 2011, at the 40 year anniversary, she opened the celebration by acknowledging the sense of urgency in the attendees, and remarked that it was similar to the sense of urgency felt at the founding of the center in 1971. After 40 years of feminist scholarship, the BCRW—and feminism—felt just as important as when the Women’s Center was founded in 1971.