By Amelia Faircloth
In celebration of Women's History Month, UC Santa Barbara's Humanities and Fine Arts division hosted a panel entitled "The Wisdom of Women," in which two faculty members stressed uplifting and recovering female voices that are not often heard in mainstream discussions of women in history.
HFA intern Colleen Coveney, a Psychology and Brain Sciences major who is minoring in Writing, engaged author and English professor Cherríe Moraga and History professor Miroslava Chávez-García in an insightful discussion that ranged from the panelists' personal histories to the difficulties they encounter in academic circles.
Moraga said Women's History Month is important to observe, but only if it is done in a way that acknowledges "specificity."
"I think [Women's History Month] can be incredibly significant. And I also think that it can get generic," Moraga said. "I always have this kind of ongoing critique, which is: What women are we talking about?"
Cherríe Moraga, a UCSB English professor and co-director of Las Maestras Center, was one of the two panelists for a Humanities and Fine arts Division event celebrating women’s history.
To Moraga, the most valuable way to approach women's history is from a more inclusive perspective: understanding the particular discrimination and oppression faced by different categories of women. A diverse approach considers how overlapping identities such as gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, affect one's experiences.
"Really looking at all those categories, specifically, I think the month could be wonderful in terms of really providing a much more expansive history," she said.
Chávez-García described how the experiences of women in her family played a significant role in her desire to study women and gender relations.
"I was really interested in looking and recovering women's voices, specifically Mexican women's voices," Chávez-García said. "And really my inspiration for this was looking at my grandmother's life."
Chávez-García told the Zoom audience that when she would visit her grandmother in the 1980s, she was always amazed at her ability to support a family and raise children while suffering abuse by her husband, in a crashing Mexican economy. Her grandmother's experiences inspired Chávez-García to study the lives of women in the 19th century, an area that had hardly been researched at the time.
"That kind of intrigued me. How did women do it in Mexico?" she said. "It was so fascinating to see how these women had made it given the conditions that they lived under. So that was really my foray into history."
Women like Chávez-García's grandmother have a massive impact on the lives of those around them. But, as co-panelist Moraga noted, these women who play such a vital role in society are often overlooked.
"We were raised by these women, that in the public world have no voice. But in the intimate world of our families, their voices were strong," Moraga said.
The world of academia is no different, as both speakers pointed out. Coming up in the university system, both professors noticed that women, specifically minority women, lacked representation. Moraga saw this contrast when she first attended college.
"When I went to college, I had mixed blood, I was queer, I was female. I was wrong in every count you could possibly be wrong in," Moraga said. "The other part, I knew, is that we were nowhere in books; there was nothing. The hunger I had to know and to learn was very deep because I wanted, somehow, to make sense of the contradictions in my being."
Chávez-García noticed a lack of minority women among the professors around her and in the curriculum taught in schools.
In a recent Humanities and Fine Arts Division event, Miroslava Chávez-García, a UCSB history professor and affiliate faculty in Feminist Studies, discussed the importance of studying the history of under-represented women.
"There's the lacking of the mirrors, and the lacking of the role models," Chávez-García said. Recently, while looking over the reading list at her daughter's high school, Chávez-García saw only one piece of literature that offered a Chicana perspective.
The scarcity of other women of color on campus gives the impression that women of diverse backgrounds "don't belong" within academia, she said.
"You don't realize the impact of the lack of these mirrors. When you walk into a space, and nobody looks like you… Then you're made to question yourself internally, like, "Am I in the right room?'"
Moraga expressed gratitude for her success as a writer and teacher but revealed that she nonetheless continues to experience a sense of not belonging.
"I'm suffering all the time at that table. I'm always questioning myself to have a right to be here," she said. "I feel that all the time. Even though you have the books, I have lots of books to my name. I consider that table, even though they are being treated very respectfully, there was a way in which my world does not matter."
In their work, both women aim to uplift the voices that have been ignored and make a place at the table for minority women. For Moraga, this can be done by encouraging students to tell their stories.
She recalled one student in particular, a female transfer student from Oaxaca, Mexico, who came into her writing class. The young woman was under the impression that she would not have a good story to tell. Moraga encouraged her to write about her people.
"Have a seat in this class," Moraga said to her. "We haven't heard your story."
As an author, she feels motivated to notice which stories still need to be told.
"[To] walk into a room and ask myself 'what's missing in this picture,' because I remember so viscerally what it's like to be missing in the picture."
To view the talk in its entirety, please click on the video below:
Amelia Faircloth is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.