“Waking The Feminists,” which was held at the Lincoln Center campus on Feb. 28, followed similar events in Ireland protesting the decision of the Abbey Theatre—the country’s national theater company—to mark the centenary of Ireland’s independence with a program that included just one play written by a woman, and just three directed by a woman.

Keri Walsh, PhD, assistant professor of English, said the gathering was about signaling to Irish women in the arts that their voices are being heard in New York, and that their  campaign is sending a galvanizing message to theatre makers here. The day’s events consisted of scholar’s panel and a practitioners’ panel and were well timed, falling on the same night as the Oscars, she said.

“The problem is not just an Irish problem, but also an American one; not just a problem in theater, but also in film and television, and not just a problem for women, but also for people of color, working class people, and anyone who hasn’t been traditionally included in storytelling on all of our various kinds of stages,” she said.

The eight member practitioners’ panel included a paper by Lucy McDiarmid discussing the subtle ways that Lady Gregory, who co-founded the Abbey with William Butler Yeats, was and was not a feminist. It also included remarks by Elizabeth Brewer Redwine about the life and work of Sara Allgood, an actor whose success took her all the way to Hollywood in the 1930s.

Clair Wills, PhD, the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University, said that protests against the exclusion of women from Irish theater are depressingly familiar. Similar protests erupted as recently as the early 1990s, when the first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991) were released with little female representation.

“We need to reflect on the fact that this kind of feminist protest appears to have so little purchase that there is little memory of previous iterations. [That] is partly what allows the persistent ignorance of women’s work and women’s representations to continue,” she said. Wills said that when she helped edit follow-up volumes, she and her co-editors took on the task of rectifying the glaring errors.

The Feb. 28 event was sponsored by Fordham’s Institute of Irish Studies and supported by Mary Brautigam, TMC ‘74, and Richard Brautigam, FCRH ’73.

Richard Brautigam said the couple, both of whom are Irish citizens, hopes to bring to Fordham the sort of scholarship and open inquiry that can be found at NYU’s Irish House, where they are members. Brautigam noted that Fordham’s history is steeped in Irish history as its founder, Archbishop John Hughes, hailed from the Emerald Isle.

“He was the greatest defender if the Irish in New York, and it’s because of him that we’ve been able for the last 150 years to proudly raise our heads above the parapet,” he said.

Mary Brautigam likewise credited Fordham with helping her build a future in the United States. She was the first of her family to be born here, and the first to graduate from college, thanks to generous financial aid she received.

“Fordham is hugely important to a great number of Irish Americans in giving them a chance for an education,” she said.

“We thought Fordham, with its legacy, would be a great place to expand the offerings in New York City of Irish culture.”

John P. Harrington, PhD, director of the institute and Dean of Arts and Sciences Faculty, said that thanks in part to the Brautigam’s generosity, Irish studies is enjoying a resurgence of interest at Fordham, as the country’s history is intertwined with not only the history of the University, but also the Catholic Church and New York City.

In addition to Waking the Feminists, the Institute will be hosting three more events this year, including a night of music and dance with the band the Narrowbacks on March 10, a presentation by Man Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright on Sunday, April 17, and an event featuring Peter Quinn and Terry Golway on Friday, May 6.

“There is a real interest in Ireland and contemporary events, because its about how small countries function in the European union, its about asylum issues; it’s a great introduction to global conflicts and issues,” he said. “It’s not just of interest to people of Irish heritage.”

Author’s Note: The women’s movement has an unjustly bad reputation when it comes to the problems of work and family. Many see feminists advancing women in the workplace, but at the expense of family and home responsibilities. In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8)this column lists feminists who have fought to change society so that work and family could be balanced. These women are champions for working families we should remember:

Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the archetypal feminist, is often blamed for feminism’s supposed interest in the workplace alone. Yet, from the late 1970s on, Friedan explored the “agonizing conflicts” of young women seeking families and careers. Calling the family the new feminist frontier in her book The Second Stage (Simon & Schuster, 1981), Friedan challenged society to create a world where work and family could be balanced and true equality achieved.

Addie Wyatt is also a founder of NOW. Wyatt based her women’s and civil rights activism in unions once she discovered that her union contract in the late 1940s protected her job for a year after giving birth. Her integrated women’s, labor, and civil rights activism made her one of the first African-American women named person of the year by Time magazine in 1975.

Patricia Schroeder is an unsung heroine. U.S. Rep. Schroeder championed the needs of working mothers in Congress from 1973-1997. She helped secure the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) and shepherded the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) to its eventual approval. When she arrived in Congress, a colleague asked Schroeder how she could possibly simultaneously raise two small children and serve. Her reply, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”

Heather Booth, a lifelong progressive activist who most famously helped found Jane, a 1960s women’s reproductive services collective. Less well known: her formation of the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC) in Chicago. ACDC is emblematic of the literally hundreds of feminist day-care advocacy groups in the 1960s and 1970s that fought for parent-controlled, affordable child care.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, eminent Supreme Court Justice, is an architect of modern women’s legal rights. Throughout, she has defended the principle that men and women share responsibility for supporting families and raising children, and that law should uphold that shared duty. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), for example, Justice Ginsburg persuaded the Court that widowers—and not just widows—should be entitled to Social Security benefits for dependent children.

Joyce Miller set up what the U.S. Department of Labor declared “the Rolls Royce of day care” programs for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in the 1960s. She then broke the glass ceiling, becoming the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the AFL-CIO. From her platform there and as president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women she launched campaigns for child care, parental leave, and the rights of pregnant workers.

Judith Lichtman & Donna Lenhoff were scrappy feminist lawyers leading the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in its early years in the 1970s. They helped write the Family and Medical Leave Act, which remains the only federal law providing job-protected leave for family care responsibilities or illness. Lichtman and Lenhoff led the 200-member coalition that secured its passage after a nearly decade-long battle.

Ellen Galinsky founded the Families and Work Institute in 1989. FWI reports guide best practices in business and routinely influence congressional debate on work and family. Galinsky now directs the When Work Works project, showing business how workplace effectiveness and flexibility can be complementary, not contradictory.

Nancy Folbre was awarded a MacArthur “genius” award for her innovative work on the economics of care in 1998. The “invisible heart,” as she calls it, adds value that conventional economics fails to recognize. A professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Folbre shows that in failing to value the work of care, support for caregiving is squeezed and discrimination against women is perpetuated.

Joan Williams has been at the forefront of tracking the “maternal wall” for nearly a decade. Bias against mothers, who are assumed to lack competence and commitment, is today the strongest and most open type of gender bias. A Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, she founded the WorkLife Law center, which has filed pioneering suits in family responsibilities discrimination.

By Kirsten Swinth

Author’s Note: The women’s movement has an unjustly bad reputation when it comes to the problems of work and family. Many see feminists advancing women in the workplace, but at the expense of family and home responsibilities. In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8)this column lists feminists who have fought to change society so that work and family could be balanced. These women are champions for working families we should remember:

Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the archetypal feminist, is often blamed for feminism’s supposed interest in the workplace alone. Yet, from the late 1970s on, Friedan explored the “agonizing conflicts” of young women seeking families and careers. Calling the family the new feminist frontier in her book The Second Stage (Simon & Schuster, 1981), Friedan challenged society to create a world where work and family could be balanced and true equality achieved.

Addie Wyatt is also a founder of NOW. Wyatt based her women’s and civil rights activism in unions once she discovered that her union contract in the late 1940s protected her job for a year after giving birth. Her integrated women’s, labor, and civil rights activism made her one of the first African-American women named person of the year by Time magazine in 1975.

Patricia Schroeder is an unsung heroine. U.S. Rep. Schroeder championed the needs of working mothers in Congress from 1973-1997. She helped secure the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) and shepherded the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) to its eventual approval. When she arrived in Congress, a colleague asked Schroeder how she could possibly simultaneously raise two small children and serve. Her reply, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”

Heather Booth, a lifelong progressive activist who most famously helped found Jane, a 1960s women’s reproductive services collective. Less well known: her formation of the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC) in Chicago. ACDC is emblematic of the literally hundreds of feminist day-care advocacy groups in the 1960s and 1970s that fought for parent-controlled, affordable child care.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, eminent Supreme Court Justice, is an architect of modern women’s legal rights. Throughout, she has defended the principle that men and women share responsibility for supporting families and raising children, and that law should uphold that shared duty. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), for example, Justice Ginsburg persuaded the Court that widowers—and not just widows—should be entitled to Social Security benefits for dependent children.

Joyce Miller set up what the U.S. Department of Labor declared “the Rolls Royce of day care” programs for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in the 1960s. She then broke the glass ceiling, becoming the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the AFL-CIO. From her platform there and as president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women she launched campaigns for child care, parental leave, and the rights of pregnant workers.

Judith Lichtman & Donna Lenhoff were scrappy feminist lawyers leading the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in its early years in the 1970s. They helped write the Family and Medical Leave Act, which remains the only federal law providing job-protected leave for family care responsibilities or illness. Lichtman and Lenhoff led the 200-member coalition that secured its passage after a nearly decade-long battle.

Ellen Galinsky founded the Families and Work Institute in 1989. FWI reports guide best practices in business and routinely influence congressional debate on work and family. Galinsky now directs the When Work Works project, showing business how workplace effectiveness and flexibility can be complementary, not contradictory.

Nancy Folbre was awarded a MacArthur “genius” award for her innovative work on the economics of care in 1998. The “invisible heart,” as she calls it, adds value that conventional economics fails to recognize. A professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Folbre shows that in failing to value the work of care, support for caregiving is squeezed and discrimination against women is perpetuated.

Joan Williams has been at the forefront of tracking the “maternal wall” for nearly a decade. Bias against mothers, who are assumed to lack competence and commitment, is today the strongest and most open type of gender bias. A Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, she founded the WorkLife Law center, which has filed pioneering suits in family responsibilities discrimination.

Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and chair of the department, is currently at work on a book on the rise of the American working family since World War II, Care & Competition in Postindustrial America: The Making of the Working Family. 

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska is running for vice president; Condoleeza Rice is secretary of state; Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the house and Sen. Hillary Clinton ran a hard-fought campaign again Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic primary.

So why is there a lack of women in leadership positions generally?

Roslyn H. Chernesky, DSW, a professor in Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), is trying to find out. Chernesky, who has researched women in management for the better part of her academic career, discussed “The Conundrum of Women in Leadership Positions” on Oct. 27 at the Lincoln Center campus.

The conference was sponsored by the GSS Institute for Women and Girls.

“I looked back on my research over the past 30 years and realized that some of the questions I raised then are still being asked today, even though things have changed,” said Chernesky, former chair of the administration concentration at GSS.

“These questions have to be asked and we have to come up with answers because it’s the only way we’re ever going to do anything about it,” she said.

Chernesky has found three conundrums for women who want to advance in their respective fields:

•    Competent women are not considered likeable, and exceptional competence makes them even less likeable and less influential.
•    Women who exercise leadership in ways that reflect how women are expected to act, such as showing empathy or being nurturing, are not considered leaders because they are doing “what women do.”
•    Women who manage or supervise in hostile workplaces tend to become “toxic handlers” in that they are likely to mediate between employees, reduce tensions, and address biases and disparities. Doing so can cause these women to exhibit symptoms and conditions, such as burnout, which demonstrate they are not capable of executive management.

Chernesky highlighted the obstacles—politically correct or not—that she said has kept women from reaching the top of the career ladder over the past four decades. In the 1970s, for example, some put forth notions that women themselves were responsible for their lack of advancement, Chernesky said.

“People said it was the way women were raised,” she said. “They didn’t want to be administrators. They felt unsuitable. It was very much the blame-the-victim mentality.”

Also in the 1970s, it was said that women made choices to remain in the positions they were in and failed to invest in their future to obtain the necessary training and experiences that would prepare them for top-management.

“I knew it wasn’t true,” Chernesky said. “I had a lot of women enroll in my administrative classes. They were out there pounding the streets and looking for these jobs.”

The 1980s focused on external barriers keeping women down, Chernesky said. Women found themselves in positions of blocked mobility, powerlessness or irrelevancy.

“A great example of this is supervision,” she said. “They have a title, but often can’t do what they ought to do because they aren’t given the necessary resources or authority.”

Moreover, a woman who excelled as a supervisor was often kept in that role because she was indispensable, Chernesky said.

Though more and more women were entering the workforce in the 1980s, Chernesky found there were no real support systems for them.

“There was no mentoring, and those in women’s networks didn’t move up,” she said. “You had to be in a men’s network.”

Women’s leadership style always differed from that of men’s, Chernesky said. “They are caring, more sensitive and offer greater empathy.” But this wasn’t seen as an advantage at first.

By the mid-1990s, the major media looked into management styles. “Popular literature, such as Time andNewsweek, said what America needed is a management style that promoted nurturing and teamwork,” she explained. “All of a sudden what women were doing became the thing to do.”

Still, women weren’t guaranteed a leg up. Chernesky found that when an organization needed to hire a woman to look good, they did so. “But those who didn’t get any pressure didn’t do it, because there was no incentive,” she said.

By 2003, Chernesky found that the gender of those making the hiring and promotion decision did not affect who gets promoted.

“There’s no evidence that men discriminate more than women when it comes to promotions,” she said. “Instead, we found that women tend to be promoted in organizations where they already have a cohort of women working in their agency.”

So what can be done about these conundrums affecting women who wish to break through the glass ceiling?

“When you want to go to the top, you have to move out of your organization to a new one,” Chernesky said, giving an example for GSS students who already are working at agencies.

“So you get your master’s in social work, but they’re not seeing you as a MSW and that’s one of the reasons they keep you where you are,” she said. “Staying in an organization for too long may be the worst thing for a woman.”

Chernesky also advised women to avoid “poisonous organizations or those with dominant male cultures. Instead, select hospitable organizations or those that strategically need women, and be likeable while demonstrating exceptional competence.”

Although known as one of the eminent poets of her generation, Ostriker told the audience that she was late in joining the feminist movement of the 1970s.

“I wanted to be a part of it, but I had children,” she explained. “In that time, you either had babies or books, and I wanted both.”

She added, “You don’t decide to become a feminist. If you do, you’re not a real one.”

Ostriker read selections from her many collections, including poems from The Mother/Child Papers(Momentum Press, 1980). She began the work during a time of great change—both personally and around the nation.

She had recently given birth to her son. The United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War and the Ohio National Guard had just shot four students at Kent State University.

The poems in The Mother/Child Papers are about large- and small-scale invasions, Ostriker explained.

“I was in the hospital giving birth to my son and the doctor gave me a spinal tap I didn’t want,” she said. “We write about whatever obsesses us at the time. That’s the beginning and the end of it, really.”

Ostriker is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University and is a faculty member of Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry.

“I tell my students, ‘Write whatever you’re afraid to write. Kill the censors.’ That’s where the power is,” she said.

Twice nominated for a National Book Award, Ostriker is author of 11 volumes of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized.

Over the years, Poets Out Loud has hosted several renowned poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Mark Doty and Derek Walcott. This year marks the first time the series featured a reading by a Fordham graduate student.

Jill Neziri, a doctoral student in English and creative writing at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, opened for Ostriker with powerful poetry that tapped into reminiscences about boating in Brooklyn and her grandparents.

Poets Out Loud was started in 1992 by a small group of faculty, staff, students and alumni to address a lack of established poetry readings in the Lincoln Center area. The group’s mission is to bring a public audience to the Lincoln Center campus and to foster the appreciation, creation and study of poetry within the University and in the wider New York City community.

The series has grown from two readings annually to a full schedule of events throughout the academic year.

Poets Out Loud also awards the annual Poets Out Loud Prize, which carries a $2,000 award and publication by Fordham University Press. The deadline to apply for the 2008-2009 prize is Oct. 15. For more information, visit the Poets Out Loud page here.