Women at Berkeley, The First Hundred Years

This is the framing narrative of the 150w History Project; it defines and explores watershed moments in four sections. Section One :1870s through the Turn of the 19 th Century. Chapter 1 covers the admission of women when the newly opened university was still defining its identity. Chapter 2 describes the 1890s, when students, alumnae, and donors banded together to create a separate system of women’s campus organizations. Chapter 3 narrates UC women’s participation in the 1911 California women’ suffrage campaign and explains its national importance. Section Two: WWI through the 1920s. Chapter 4 is on the impact of WWI in changing gender relations and expectations among the undergraduates; Chapters 5 and 6 describe the arrival of the first cohort of women faculty and their struggle for professional recognition on campus. Section Three: WWII through the 1950s. These chapters describe WWII as the central cause of a rapid increase in women’s academic and leadership opportunities, followed by a sharp drop and lingering postwar decline. Chapter 7 explores the new careers and occupations that war mobilization opened to UC women. Chapter 8 examines the crucial war-time work of the leaders of the all-female student government as well as the exile of Japanese American students and recent graduates to internment camps. Chapters 9 and 10 explain the shrinkage of women’s presence on campus, and their difficulty finding suitable employment once they graduated. The university was also reluctant to hire its own women PhDs, so many were underemployed. Chapter 11 turns to Berkeley’s student movements of the 1960s, which were intertwined with both sexual liberation and civil rights struggles. They prepared the way for the movement led by academic women in the early seventies for nondiscriminatory employment opportunities, which is explored in Chapter 12.