History Practice Roundtable: Embracing Equity: Discussing Inequity

History Practice Roundtable: Embracing Equity: Discussing Inequity

Deena J. González Response to Linda Kerber, Journal of Women’s History, 18:1 (Spring, 2006).

I attended Berkeley in the 1970s, an era when only three women (out of a history faculty of over 50) were housed in the department, They were models of what a historian could be—analytical, graceful, professorial, and energetic (Natalie Davis, Paula Fess, and Lynn Hunt). I did not reckon from the outset with feminism, theirs or my own, with sexism, that of the department or in the university, or with homophobia. Rather, my focus as a graduate student of color in those years was largely grounded in the racism and prejudices that ran rampant through all university environments. All the other intersecting --isms were there, to be sure, either in blunt attacks or subtle slights. Until I took my first job, truly a novice I was ABD, had been away from the dissertation, and had written no pages in over three years, I had no vocabulary to name my situation. The roles of sexism as well as racism, of heterosexism as well as of homophobia, in the modern academy came to shape me early in my career as they infused my scholarship in those first years of nervous instructorship. The two years flew by and my position was converted into an assistant professorship when I squeaked to the finish line and Pomona College deemed me worthy of tenure-track employment, but as a joint appointment in the history department and Chicano/a Studies. That signified one body and two full-time jobs, which then I occupied for the next eighteen years. I would also serve on over twenty search committees in that same period and would help increase the number of women of color whose areas of specialization explored the lives of women of color from one to seven by the time that I left the post.