Kathy Kaiser is a writer, editor, and manager with a broad background in editing articles and books as well as working as a freelance editor. Kaiser was part of Frontiers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, as a community member who served on the Journal’s editorial board. In her interview, she identified the importance of merging community and academia together so that Frontiers would not be identified solely as an academic research text. As a full-time journalist and a self-identified feminist, Frontiers was a place where Kaiser could be in community with other women in consciousness raising.
Although she doesn’t recall specific, local community events happening in tandem with Frontiers’ development, there were several civil rights concurrent movements that propelled the staffers of the Journal, including the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Anti-War Movement, and the Civil Rights Movements. She recalls that some of the issues that the editorial collective focused on were childcare, sexual harassment, and equal pay.
Kaiser was especially fond of the camaraderie that she shared with the other women who were part of the Journal. She remembers a book, My Mother, Myself, that the editorial board engaged with that generated conversation within the Frontiers collective of women about the differences between themselves and the previous generation, their mothers. In her interview, she shares this significant, personal memory:
“One thing that I remember very clearly is having a meeting, we were all talking about our mothers, and at that point there was a book that came out shortly after that called My Mother Myself, and there was always kind of an awareness that our mothers had influenced us, which kind of sounds strange I know now, but at that time our mothers were considered housewives, housekeepers, not very important. I remember one meeting where we just started talking about our mothers and all of a sudden out of that came the whole issue of being a woman, being a mother and what that was like and so there was a certain amount of sharing that became articles in the Journal” (Kaiser, p. 7).
Find more about Kathy here.
Selected Quotes from Frontiers at 50 Oral History Interview
“I was working at what was then the campus newspaper, The Colorado Daily. And it was independent of the University of Colorado. And I must have been asked by somebody on the board to join the collective. I’m not sure what the situation is now with Frontiers but at that point, they were very much interested in community and academia merging together. So there were three of us from the newspaper or from the community who were not academics, who became part of the collective.” (p. 2)
“There was a sense at that time that we wanted to open up to the larger community. We didn’t just want to be an academic journal. There was a lot going on with women’s issues, women’s liberation at that time. And we wanted to kind of encompass everything, not just academia, but what was going on in the community.” (p. 5)
“I got a real education that carried over to my work as a journalist in influencing how I saw things and you know, what I wrote about. I wrote about a lot of women’s issues, daycare, free daycare for women, and sexual assault and all of that, but you know, because we talked about that, and I learned it from an academic viewpoint, and so it just carried over for the rest of whatever I did.” (p. 5)
“At the time there were what we call consciousness raising groups of women, who would get together and just talk about our lives, and discover that we all had similar experiences of being ignored by men, being harassed by men, that kind of thing, and that we weren’t the only ones. Out of that I think came a real power and a real kind of anger to change things.” (p. 5)
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