by Abby Palko, February 15, 2022
I remember a conversation I had with President Sullivan near the end of her tenure as UVA’s 8th president. We were talking about her legacy, considering what she will be remembered for beyond being the first woman to serve as UVA’s president. In that context, I shared a story of a moment of realization I’d had when I arrived at UVA in 2016. I knew that representation matters. I’d glibly repeated the phrase, “if you can see it, you can be it” untold times. And yet. I didn’t appreciate how discouraging it had been for me to teach in an institution where I knew that I could never become president – not because I lacked any crucial skill or talent, but merely because, having been born a woman, I could never be the priest its president is required to be.
I’d spent 8 years teaching in the Gender Studies Program at my previous institution. I’d earned my bachelor's degree at an all-women’s college. And yet. I hadn’t let myself fully absorb how disheartening that second-class citizenship was for me.
Like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating water, my awareness of the oppressive (to my aspirations) impact of the exclusion only came after I’d extricated myself from the pot. And as I shared this epiphany with President Sullivan, I argued that it really did matter that she had broken that ceiling here at UVA. What you see when when you pull up the official University website picturing all nine presidents has implications. Today the visual no longer suggests that only those in the 30% of the population who are white men are presidential material. It needs to be said in the same breath that the same visual still suggests that only those in the 60% of the population who are white are potentially presidential.
Virginia Woolf famously evokes Judith, Shakespeare’s fictionalized sister, in her efforts to understand why women’s literary production lags so far behind men’s, leading her to advocate that women intellectuals need a room and financial independence. I’ve spent the past five years here at UVA diving into archives, talking to alums, learning all I can about the University’s history and the roles that women have occupied – and been denied. (This is the moment when I say: please contact me to share your story!)
I think a lot about Mrs. Betty Slaughter. I’ve read tributes to her and noted the affectionate nickname, Betty Co-ed, bestowed upon her by women studying at UVA in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. I have wondered: what was it like for her? What did she think? How did she feel, when every day, she walked into the Coed Room on the West Range, knowing that as an African American woman, she was not welcome in the classroom? Knowing that while the female students she took care of might call her “Betty Coed,” she would never actually be permitted to matriculate?
Why do we celebrate Women’s History Month? There are two sides to the answer.
What accomplishments have we forgotten because we didn’t deem them worthy of remembering? How many of today’s students do not realize that a woman has served as President of UVA? How many (erroneously) think there were no women studying here before 1970? How many people rely on women’s inventions to help them literally see and communicate better without knowing who deserves the credit for making life easier? How many people know that Patricia Bath pioneered cataract treatment? That Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm and Evelyn Berezin invented the first computer-driven word processor?
And what accomplishments have we missed out on because we discouraged or flat-out forbade women from fully developing their talents and following their aspirations? Of the 46 Presidents of the US, all have been men. The first 48 of 49 people to serve as Vice President were men. Imagine if Victoria Woodhull and Frederick Douglass had been elected in 1872. In the 225+ years of its existence, the Supreme Court has had 98 men and 5 women serve as Associate Justices (all 17 Chief Justices have been men). The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously replied, “When there are nine” when she was questioned as when there would be enough women on the Court. At the same time, the United States is the only industrialized country that does not guarantee paid family leave for new parents and, along with six island nations in the Pacific, is the only country in the world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave.
Incomplete histories reinforce exclusions and excuse a lack of resource such as these. The seeds of our efforts to encourage a pan-University celebration of Women’s History Month may have been planted just a couple of years ago in my conversation with President Sullivan. The need to share and honor the complete version of our history is not new, however. How we tell our history matters. Stopping to ask, “whose story hasn’t been told? whose story was cut short?” supports efforts to revise and expand an exclusionary understanding of who belongs at this University.