Fifty Years of Community, Love, and Resistance: Gender Studies at the University of Utah

When Louise Knauer, lecturer in history, was appointed in 1977 as the first coordinator of Women's Studies, her office was housed in the west wing of the Annex building. The position was funded not by the university's hardline budget but by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities – a tenuous beginning for a program that had been operating since 1971, teaching classes and serving students without formal university approval or funding. Says Knauer, “The Women's Resource Center was doing an innovative and excellent job in supporting women students, but didn't seem to be the appropriate place for an academic program. We wanted to create a program in which students could study about women's place in society currently and historically.”

The goal to create an academic department has been a marked success. This October, several hundred people gathered for a gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of what is now Gender Studies at the University of Utah. The event honored five decades of scholarship, activism, and community-building while raising funds for student scholarships. It also marked a moment of transition: Gender Studies, along with other units in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation, has merged into a new Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies (retaining the major and minor as well as all faculty lines) within the College of Humanities. The restructuring represents opportunities but raises concerns for those who have committed decades to the development of women’s and gender studies at the University of Utah.

Erin Graham, Associate Professor (Lecturer) in the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies, is co-investigator on a Mellon Foundation grant funding a research project to uncover the history of the department that has been taking place over the past two years. “Women’s and Gender Studies exists today because of the persistence, vision, and determination of its founders, people like Louise Knauer and the members of the Ad-Hoc Committee for Women’s Studies,” says Graham. She continues, “Despite facing significant challenges at both the university and state levels, they organized strategically to create lasting structural change. Their efforts throughout the 1970s and 1980s laid a foundation that generations of faculty, staff, and students have continued to build upon. The work we do today is possible because of the groundwork they so courageously set in motion.”

The story of how Gender Studies survived its first fifty years, moving through multiple physical locations, cobbling together budgets from various sources, and repeatedly justifying its existence, reveals the precarious reality of interdisciplinary programs centered on questions of power, identity, equality, and social justice in American higher education.

Borrowed Time and Unknown Futures

The Women's Studies program emerged from, as Humanities dean Wanda Pillow and student researcher Rosa Pimentel characterized it, “personal sacrifice, borrowed time, and unknown futures, nurtured through community, love, and resistance.” The first class, Sociology of Women, was offered through the Women's Resource Center in 1971, just one year before Title IX became law. By 1975, the university had submitted a proposal to the State Board of Regents to establish an official Women's Studies program with an academic emphasis, administered by the Women's Resource Center.

Then came a stunning reversal. The State Board of Regents confirmed that although the Women's Resource Center had been running Women’s Studies since 1971, it had never actually received official funding or approval. The university withdrew its proposal.

For two years, Women's Studies existed in institutional limbo. An Ad Hoc Committee worked to provide curriculum and a funding blueprint. Classes were cross-listed between the Women's Resource Center and various academic departments. The "Founding Mothers" of the program, Louise Knauer, Pat Albers, Patty Reagan, Lee Reynis, Shauna Adix, Dair Gillespie, and Ann Parsons, continued organizing, teaching, and advocating. In 1978, historian Dr. Kathryn “Kitty” Sklar from UCLA was brought to campus as a consultant to support the program's development.

The breakthrough came in 1979, when the major emphasis was finally approved through the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences with a budget of $5,000 from Dean William “Bill” Prokasy. The following year, a minor was added. By 1984, total enrollment had increased 52 percent from 1982. The program requested a budget of $55,000 for 1984-1985 and received $15,000 from the Division of Continuing Education, a pattern that would repeat throughout the decade.

An Academic Nomad

Throughout the 1980s, Women's Studies was an academic nomad on campus, its budget pieced together from multiple sources: the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Division of Continuing Education, the Graduate School of Education, and the College of Humanities. In 1984, the program was moved to the Academic Vice President's Office under Afesa Adams, along with Ethnic Studies and International Studies – a grouping that foreshadowed the eventual creation of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation decades later.

Director Patty Reagan, who took the helm in 1986, spearheaded the development of the major and minor while working to secure more stable funding. The following year, the Academic Senate recommended that university administration provide a hardline budget, permanent space, and an administrative location for Women’s Studies. The program eventually settled into Building 44 in 1987.  

This period of institutional struggle coincided with intellectual transformation. When Kathryn Bond Stockton arrived at the University of Utah in 1987 as a new professor, she helped catalyze what came to be known as the "Curriculum Revolution." Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, the program more intentionally incorporated queer theory and intersectional approaches into its curriculum, redeveloping courses so that all classes addressed race and class issues as well as post-structuralist theory.

The timing reflected broader movements for social justice on campus and in the community. The Gay Student Union (later to become the Lesbian and Gay Student Union), established in 1975, continued its activism throughout the decade, hosting a Lesbian and Gay Conference in 1983 among other events and advocacy efforts. In 1990, faculty and staff signed a Human Rights Petition calling for the university's employment policy to include "sexual and affectional orientation" in its nondiscrimination clause, seeking to protect lesbian, gay, and bisexual faculty and staff from discrimination on campus. By 1996, there were around 200 Women’s Studies majors and minors – a significant achievement for a program that had spent so much of its existence fighting for recognition and resources.

Transformation and Expansion

In 2000, Stockton became director and two years later oversaw the program's renaming from Women's Studies to Gender Studies, reflecting evolution in scholarship and the field's commitment to examining all aspects of gender, sexuality, and power. The 2000s saw the program emerge from debt and increase collaborations with Ethnic Studies. The LGBT Resource Center at the University of Utah was founded in 2002, providing another anchor for community and support.

Reflecting on the rapid expansion of the program during this time, Stockton cites her north star: keeping students at the center of education. “Holding ourselves accountable to students,” says Stockton, “—the questions they were asking, the issues they were living—led to our hiring of charismatic scholars who love to teach. How satisfying that these hires inspired by students eventually gave our program a top five national status in article citations, academic awards, and (with Ethnic Studies) intersectional inquiry. I will always cherish this collective co-creation between students and the scholars who listen to them.”

The institutional landscape shifted significantly in 2016 with the founding of the School for Cultural & Social Transformation (Transform). Transform offered majors in Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies, underscoring the historic and ongoing connections between the two programs. Pacific Island Studies joined in 2017, and Disability Studies in 2018. This accompanied a move to Gardner Commons, bringing all the programs under one roof.

Multiple faculty members were hired as joint appointments between Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies, deepening the intersectional approach that had become central to the program's identity. This was a significant inflection point, says Pillow; “A division being approved to have tenure lines is a real benchmark for legitimacy within the university ecosystem. This enabled Gender Studies to attract faculty from top-notch programs, building on the reputation and quality of the fledgling school.”

The national context shifted as well. In 2015, the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges guaranteed the fundamental right of marriage to same-sex couples – an outcome that reflected decades of LGBTQ+ activism, including the work done by Gender Studies faculty, students, and community partners.

Recent years have seen continued innovation and growth. In 2022, Transform was awarded a Mellon grant to launch the Transformative Intersectional Collective (TRIC), a three-year action plan integrating intersectionality into curriculum and pedagogy, research, and community engagement, with Transform’s inaugural dean, Kathryn Stockton, serving as principal investigator. The grant was renewed in August 2025 with Wanda Pillow as principal investigator. Andrea Baldwin founded the Black Feminist Eco Lab in 2023, bringing together scholars to create new paradigms for Black feminist ecological thinking, and in 2024 Kim Hackford-Peer led the creation of the first annual Joy and Fury Teach-In.

Beginning in 2023, the Mellon-funded project called "Formations and Futures: Gender Studies at the University of Utah" documented the program's history through archival research and oral history interviews. The work of recovering this history, conducted by undergraduate interns Sol Martinez, Brenna Coleman, Brittney Mellin, Rosa Pimentel, Xochi Stensaas, Halle Rex, and Jill Dumont, along with graduate student Whitney Hills and faculty members Erin Graham and Wanda Pillow, has been essential to understanding how the program survived and thrived through decades of hard work and dedication. (The research done through this project serves as the basis for this article.)

Celebrating a Half Century

The history that emerges is not one of steady institutional support but of constant negotiation and persistent advocacy. For fifty years, Gender Studies has had to prove its worth repeatedly: to justify its budget, defend its curriculum, demonstrate its enrollment numbers, articulate its value to the university and the broader community.

Yet the program has also been sustained by community, love, and resistance. These weren't just inspirational words, but operating principles. Community meant building networks of support among faculty, students, staff, and allies both on campus and beyond. Love meant genuine care for the intellectual work and for the people doing it. Resistance meant insisting that that programs centered on gender, sexuality, race, and justice were just as legitimate as other academic disciplines.

Ella Myers, chair of the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies, lends her voice to this insistence. “Gender Studies is a vibrant field of study that is central to academic inquiry not only in the U.S., but around the globe. It is interdisciplinary, meaning it brings together perspectives from many fields of study, including the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and natural sciences, in order to generate a multifaceted understanding of the world,” she says. She lays out a simple, yet impactful summary of what the discipline’s goals, continuing, “Gender Studies examines how gender interacts with other forms of power to shape our institutions and our lives. It is both a critical and a visionary endeavor — one that both maps societies as they are and dares to imagine how we might live together differently."

 As Gender Studies merges with the College of Humanities, those who have built and sustained the program face another evolution in the shape of this discipline on campus. But what is certain is that the work continues. The gala celebrating fifty years was, by all accounts, joyful – and joy, in this context, is also resistance. It is an assertion that this work matters, that these questions deserve sustained inquiry, that this community will persist.

The founders of Women's Studies built their program on borrowed time and unknown futures, but with hope and determination. Five decades later, their successors continue building on that same foundation. They will do what they have always done: teaching, researching, supporting university mission, organizing, and asking the questions that need to be asked—continuing, as they always have, in community, love, and resistance.