Strength in numbers: a women-led UW faculty group meets in 1975 for the formation of what has become the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. UW Archives S17032

Before the 1970s, to study the history of the world was largely to learn of men fighting wars. Modern literature meant reading the best male authors. Insert any academic discipline, and a woman’s experience or perspective was scarcely to be found.

“Teachers told me about a world in which ostensibly one-half the human race is doing everything significant, and the other half doesn’t exist,” said the late Gerda Lerner, a UW–Madison historian and women’s studies pioneer.

For nearly a half century, the UW–Madison Department of Gender and Women’s Studies has set out to shift that traditional paradigm in education and research. It’s grown into one of the most respected and robust programs in the nation, conferring an undergraduate major and certificate, an LGBTQ+ studies certificate, a master’s degree, and a doctoral minor.

Today, more than 400 undergraduates are enrolled in either the certificate or degree program. The department offers some 25 courses per semester, with 100 more cross-listed with other departments. Fifteen faculty members and nearly 50 affiliated instructors teach courses in a wide range of fields: from biology and psychology to law and politics; from literature and languages to history and religious studies. Increasingly, courses are exploring the intersections of gender identity, sexuality, race, and disability.

“We’ve always been strongly interdisciplinary across the humanities, the social sciences, and even the biological sciences,” says Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and gender and women’s studies, whose research has debunked myths of biological differences between men and women related to personality and cognitive ability.

The field of women’s studies rose alongside the larger women’s movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s. On the UW campus, groups of female faculty connected demands for fair pay and hiring with a desire for a centralized women’s studies program. Following an effort across the UW System, a UW–Madison committee appointed by Chancellor Edwin Young MA’42, PhD’50 established a framework for what would officially become the Women’s Studies Program in 1975.

The program began with less than a handful of courses and faculty members who held joint appointments on campus. In 2008, the program became a full academic department, with the ability to hire faculty of its own and independently offer tenure. It’s currently in the process of establishing a PhD program, which would finish rounding out its academic offerings and no doubt please the foremothers of women’s studies.

“I want women’s history to be legitimate,” Lerner once wrote. “To be part of every curriculum on every level.”

Alice O’Neill MFAx’12 prints from a block of lithographic limestone.

Luckeroth is a student in Art 316: Lithography. Taught by Professor Jack Damer, the course combines artistry, history, science, and technology to help students learn a printing process that seems ancient but is actually quite modern.

“A lot of students are turned off by working with stone in the twenty-first century,” Damer says. “But the process was created in 1798, making it one of the newest forms of printmaking.”

Lithography literally means writing with stone, and it’s the basis of today’s offset commercial printing. Metal plates replaced stones long ago in the commercial world, but traditional lithography is still embraced by artists. Damer teaches his students to use both traditional stone and metal plates.

In traditional lithography, an artist creates imagery with grease-based material on the limestone surface. He or she then wets the image and applies printing ink, which sticks to the grease but not to the ungreased parts of the stone. The artist may then make multiple prints of that image by repeating the inking process. When finished, he or she can prepare the stone for a different project by abrading it to create a clean surface.

Lithography class involves teaching students a variety of skills, such as how to mix ink in preparation to print (above) and how to create an image by applying, then scraping away, greasy materials (below).

Damer’s class sizes are relatively small, with between eight and twenty students enrolling at a time. And though ink isn’t expensive, blocks of lithograph limestone are small treasures, and costs can run from $1,000 to $4,000, depending on the size of the block.

Damer, who says he’s always been interested in printmaking, has been practicing lithography for more than four decades, though he admits the demands of teaching limit his time to work as a print-maker. “The process is simple,” he says, “but it’s tricky, because of the chemical nature. A lot of my teaching is solving technical problems for the students.”

But for those who learn the intricacies of lithography, the print form can become a passion. “It’s kind of a magical process,” Damer says. “People either dislike it, or they get hooked on it.”