Women of OU take action in the '70s

by Sara Schonhardt
Staff Writer

The 1970s were a time of growth and increased support for feminism. Organizations formed and new battles began, but opposition to the women's movement still existed.

In 1975, the removal of the Ohio University Women's Center showed many women that people viewed feminism as unimportant and that there was no place for it on campus, said Jan Griesinger, the director of United Campus Ministry.

The continued movements proved feminism's significance to many people and Griesinger said this gave energy to feminism in the '70s.

"The movements have always been fairly small — they were just so powerful because they were new," she said.

These new ideas about women's rights resulted in the formation of numerous organizations around OU's campus, said Susan Price, an OU alumna who co-founded the Athens chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1973, and participated in University Women's Week during the early '70s.

"The nice thing about these early women's groups was that they included an array of people both young and old," Price said. "Students, administrators and locals all gathered together to discuss the issues."

Around the time NOW began the progression of the movement, more people began to be involved. But at that time women's groups were not actively asking men to participate in the movement, Price said.

"Women needed to talk with each other about issues that affected them and not worry about what men thought," she said.

Some of the major issues that arose during the '70s were childcare and employment, which drew much attention at OU near the end of the decade.

In 1972, the "Status of Women Report," found that 69 percent of the 108 women working at the university earned less than $10,000 a year, while only 18 percent of their 445 male counterparts earned below this amount.

This figure helped set the stage for legal proceedings in the spring of 1978 when the women in the school of music brought a case against OU concerning unequal pay.

The music school took advantage of faculty wives whose husbands worked for the university, said Lucile Jennings, a faculty wife who taught in the school of music from 1962 until 1992.

"We were expected to fill in-depth teaching positions and were paid very little," she said. "We enjoyed teaching, but were tired of this."

Pauline Gagliano took charge of the effort for pay compensation, and the seven women working in the school of music joined together to bring a case before the ombudsman at OU.

Jennings said she and other members in the school of music felt the men in the university's administration resented what they were doing.

In 1979, amends were made and the music department gave each of the women promotions along with large bonuses.

But after what happened in the school of music, other departments did not follow suit, and a number of majors still remained gender-oriented.

Nearly all of the students in elementary education were women, while they made up only 12 percent of business students and only 3 percent of students in engineering.

However, Drusilla Evarts, who became the first woman faculty member in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 1973, said she did not feel the effects of inequality.

"I don't feel that I've ever been treated differently," she said.

As the original advisor to American Women in Communication, Evarts said, "the organization got the same support as any men's group."

But other women on campus did not share this view at the time, and battles surrounding equal pay, abortion, and rape kept developing.

"There has always been unequal treatment of women on this campus," Jennings said. "Our efforts make it better, but they didn't change everything."