Douglass women then and now
Archived article from Oct 26, 2001
By Joni Scanlon
Retired political science Professor Roberta Sigel had no idea what she was getting into in 1975, when she asked students in her advanced undergraduate seminar at Douglass College to develop a survey exploring the effects of social change across generations.
Reasonably, or so she thought, Sigel suggested the students choose a research topic from the day's headlines dealing with Vietnam or the post-Watergate era. But to the professor's immense surprise, the young women in her class flatly refused to consider those topics.
"The only subject they would hear of was women," Sigel recalls. "It was really a revelation to me, because I had no idea up to that point how much the women's movement apparently meant to these students."
After rethinking the assignment, Sigel suggested that her students survey members of the class of 1975 whose mothers had attended Douglass College a generation earlier. The result was a fascinating comparison of two generations and a new direction for Sigel's own research, which explores how women's roles are changing over time. Sigel has since written several books on the topic.
Sigel -- who retired from teaching in 1987 but continues her research as an associate of the Institute for Women's Leadership at Douglass -- recently had the opportunity to revisit many of the 44 survey participants from the class of 1975 to see how they, and their idealism, had fared in the intervening 25 years. In addition, Sigel and co-researcher Krista Jenkins, a graduate student in political science at Rutgers, surveyed 23 recent graduates whose mothers had also attended Douglass.
The new study probes the two generations' views about women's equality, the women's movement, the effectiveness of political and social activism in general, and the importance of attending an all-women's college. Interestingly, recent graduates and those of 1975 are likely to hold similar views on issues affecting women.
Perhaps the most startling finding, says Sigel of the 2000 survey, was that the 1975 and 2000 graduates are equally disillusioned by politics. Sigel says she was sure the fires of activism would still burn bright for the class of 1975, which, after all, had been shaped by the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Once again, the students managed to surprise her.
"What happened to them, I think, is they got turned off by Watergate, by Vietnam, even by the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Some of them had participated in local government, but then got turned off by the pettiness of local politics."
Sigel was pleased to report that the younger graduates, despite their disillusionment, harbored a strong spirit of volunteerism: "Unlike their mothers' generation, the daughters are very active in volunteer work. They're working in soup kitchens, at Habitat for Humanity. They are by no means an alienated and self-absorbed generation."
Both generations are enthusiastic in their praise of women's colleges. "A lot of them felt that if they had been in a coed college, they would not have spoken up as freely or expressed themselves as openly in class," reports Sigel. "They talked about how they were able to come into contact with and gain great admiration for women who are strong and purposeful. They felt it gave them confidence to believe that it is all right to be a person in their own right."
The project was supported by the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College, the Institute for Women's Leadership and the Spencer Foundation. The Center for Public Interest Polling at the Eagleton Institute of Politics assisted in conducting in-depth interviews.
In contrast to the 2000 study, Sigel points out, the 1975 class project confirmed the dramatic social transitions that women of the time were seeing all around them. Nowhere were these shifts more evident than on the Douglass campus, she says.
"Many of the 1975 students came from small towns in New Jersey. They hadn't really heard about the women's movement until they came to campus, and then Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and other prominent women came out to speak to them," she recalls.
In their 1975 survey, Sigel's students reported that a significant divide separated the 44 mothers from their daughters, especially concerning their views about women's equality and the role of the women's movement.
"There was a real generation gap between the mothers and daughters in 1975," Sigel notes. "The daughters' sexual behavior and career ambitions were much more advanced than their mothers'. While the mothers were favorably disposed toward women's rights, such as equal pay, they weren't interested in women entering blue-collar jobs or the military, and they were much more conservative about permitting information about contraceptives, for example.
"Many of the mothers had careers up until the point they married or had children, when they stopped working," Sigel adds. "For this generation of mothers, their whole lives really were quite domestic."
Today, Sigel finds that the differences between mothers and daughters are much smaller. The generation gap that once separated mothers and daughters, in fact, appears to be shrinking.
"The differences today are more like going from using a phone to a cell phone or a typewriter to a computer," suggests Sigel. "It wasn't the jump from writing in a yellow pad to using a computer, which is what we saw in 1975." <
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