A historian by training, Professor Elizabeth Jameson served as the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, and as the Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New Mexico. While at the University of Calgary, she served as the Chair of American Studies. She is the author of two monographs, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (1988) and Building Colorado: The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America in the Centennial State (1984). She also co-edited three collections of essays dedicated to exploring the women’s experience in the West. Her research has focused on grass-roots history.
Jameson became involved with the formation of Frontiers during her dissertation research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. As an out-of-state graduate student at the University of Michigan, she became enmeshed in the active feminist community in Boulder. Her experiences in developing a Women’s Studies program and a journal (Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies) at the University of Michigan led to her involvement in promoting new scholarship and practice in the West. She suggests that the Michigan Papers may have been an early influence on the formation of Frontiers. As Jameson explains in her interview, “…that’s part of how I got recruited into the committee at Boulder to lobby for the Women’s Studies program there and to hire the first director, who was Carol Pearson. And out of that came the group that founded Frontiers” (Jameson, p. 4).
Given that the editorial collective emerged from the Women’s Movement and allied consciousness raising, she notes that the Journal was committed to non-competitive, non-hierarchical working processes and an investment in marginalized voices. Furthermore, the elements of feeling and experience were elevated, explaining that “our feminist analysis began there with trusting feelings that we had been told were weird or abnormal, and learning to trust one another” (Jameson, p. 5).
Accessible language was of high value though she acknowledges that academic language and emerging bodies of thought created new tensions with this original goal. Jameson also reports on the struggles of a purely collective editorial entity, describing the group’s realization that they would have to specialize in their roles in order to avoid burn-out. She recognizes the singular leadership of co-editor Kathi George, who she credits with keeping a protective eye over the Journal as it moved to new host universities.
By 1989, Jameson had become the Director of the Women Studies Program at the University of New Mexico. She recalls George asking if it was possible to move the Journal to the University of New Mexico. Given a supportive administration and a receptive Women’s Studies program, the move of the Journal was successful. As she observes, the Journal’s move proved a strong fit as UNM’s “Women’s Studies Program had had strong ties with community women, it had from the get-go been absolutely dedicated to racial and class inclusion in ways that not all the first Women’s Studies programs have been” (Jameson, p. 5).
Of utmost importance, the Journal now received the formalized administrative, financial, and legal support that it lacked at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “Articles of Incorporation” were drawn up and a working model similar to the feminist journal Signs was also established.
Find more about Professor Jameson here.
Selected Quotes from Frontiers at 50 Oral History Interview
“We have learned to trust experiential knowledge. And from that perspective, we wanted to value all women’s expertise about what it is to be a woman. And we came out of an egalitarian movement. We began with this notion that it would be a collective, it would work by consensus, we would all do everything. We would not have some people who were experts and other people who did the typing and the mailing. And we kept to that part of the vision. We did eventually, or pretty quickly, learn that we were going to burn ourselves out trying to do everything and that some people needed to specialize.” (p. 5)
“I think if we’re trying to fully empower women as subjects of our own lives and people of color as subjects of their own lives, you don’t do it in a language that none of us understand. I mean we’ve all fallen into some of that. I was influenced as an undergrad by some Marxist theory and I remember going to, I think, a march in Dayton, and trying to talk to a secretary about her alienated labor. And she looked at me like I was, you know, a snotty little creep who didn’t understand her world, which was true. If you go up to someone and say, you know, “I recognize your subaltern status” bullshit, you do bullshit. You have to find a way to talk to people. If we’re about an empowering pedagogy and empowering scholarship, we don’t empower people by erecting hierarchies of language.” (p. 16)
“We moved from multicultural to co-construction, to look at how identities were co-constructed, to now intersectionality. But I would want to keep the focus there. I think we need work that informs transformative politics…But more than that, my own work looks at how history is made from private and grassroots spaces. How “ordinary people” make history, make change.” (p. 21)
The full oral history interview video and transcript can be found at the following Frontiers archives locations:
UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library:
University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library:
ACCN3283 Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies Oral History Collection