Throughout a thirty-year career, Professor Susan Armitage contributed to the history and study of women in the western United States through her research, publishing, teaching, and public outreach. Her career began in 1973 at the University of Colorado-Boulder as a visiting Assistant professor of History and director of the Boulder Women’s Oral History Project. In 1978, she became an Assistant professor in History and the first director of Women’s Studies at Washington State University where she remained until she retired in 2008. She co-edited three collections, wrote articles and collaborated on textbooks, served on the editorial board of multiple journals, and worked across academic institutions as well as with other educational institutions and programs, including the Women in the West Museum, Washington Women’s Heritage Project, Center for Columbia River History. Her work extended internationally to India, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Estonia. She was appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and in 2008 she was named Washington State University Woman of the Year and became Emerita Professor of History and Women’s Studies. In 2015, she published her book Shaping the Public Good: Women Making History in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon State University Press).
Armitage was introduced to Frontiers in the 1970s when it was founded at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Although she had not yet joined the editorial collective, she published her first article with Frontiers in 1977: “Black Women and their Communities in Colorado.” This article, written with Theresa Banfield and Sarah Jacobus, was based on her oral histories with Black women in the American west. Then in 1995, Armitage was contacted by the editorial team at the University of New Mexico to take the Journal. Because she was able to get institutional support from WSU, including funds for a managing editor and editorial assistant, she accepted the offer and housed Frontiers in the Women’s Studies department from 1997-2003.
In addition to her awareness of the Journal and its importance to the field, Armitage’s interest in the Journal stemmed from its founding principles of focusing on the American west, its commitment to collective work, and its mission of bridging the academy and community. When Frontiers moved to Washington State University, she sought to revive this original vision with a particular emphasis on building a popular audience. She insisted that papers be submitted in “standard English” for accessibility purposes, an increasingly difficult task due to changes in academic discourse and the centering of theoretical language.
Another way she pursued this goal was through publishing the issues in a multi-genre format to include different types of work such as art, poetry, and fiction. In this vein, she and her editorial team also developed a special kind of essay which were “personal essays that turned into larger theoretical issues” (Armitage, p. 17). This type of essay used elements of memoir and autobiography to engage with broader scholarly conversations. Although not all these goals were fulfilled, she was ultimately happy with what the Journal published during this time.
Armitage identified another major contribution during her editorship as the cultivation of racial and ethnic diversity. She concentrated on publishing articles by and about women of color, recruited women of color faculty for the editorial board, and when tensions arose at WSU around issues of race, she encouraged students to write about them for the Journal. She is proud of the Journal’s publication record on issues and essays devoted to Latina, Indigenous, and Asian American women’s research topics.
Find more about Professor Armitage here.
Selected Quotes from Frontiers at 50 Oral History Interview
“We did two major Chicana issues, an Asian American issue, an Indigenous women issue. I think that was it. But I was trying very hard to give the impression or make the commitment on paper to as much ethnic, racial diversity as we could find. As time went on the word got out that Frontiers was publishing articles by and about women of color so we got some submissions that way.” (p. 10)
“So far as I know, Frontiers is one of the first journals to run an entire issue on Asian American women. It was basically at the discovery stage, or so it felt like to me. Whether that felt the same way to members of various ethnic groups, I really don’t know.” (p. 11)
“I thought if there was ever going to be any kind of popular audience for Frontiers, the articles themselves had to be readable and accessible. So increasingly, as you could imagine, as time went on, we did more editing to translate whatever theory people thought they were working with, back into standard English. So that was an important commitment of mine, but it was one that didn’t survive when the Journal moved on.” (p. 14-15)
“I do feel as though Frontiers was part of the larger shift to the emphasis on the complexities of race, the commitment to intersectionality of one kind or another. Otherwise, we would have been a very stodgy white journal and I don’t think we were. …One was this notion of a journal that was not just academic articles, but had art and, and poetry and fiction, as well. So, this mixture seemed to be important. I’m not aware that any of the current journals do that.” (p. 17)
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