The History of Women at SFU

By: Micaela Evans and Cecile Favron

In the summer of 1968, a group of women with children approached the SFU administration and asked for a room to set up a daycare. The administration swiftly denied their request. The women set one up anyway.

This was just one instance in a movement for women’s rights that swept SFU in the 1960s. The struggle shared similar concerns with those that women currently face on campuses across the world, and ultimately led to the opportunities that women at SFU have today.

The story of women’s rights at SFU is as complicated and ambiguous as it is radical and liberating. When SFU’s campus first opened in 1965, the climate was starkly different than the one we know today.

Kate Braid, a member of the SFU Women’s Caucus and a Peak contributor in the 1970s, recalls the feeling of SFU’s campus in those early days as one which included great barriers but also incredible optimism.

“In those days the atmosphere was fermenting — people were talking all the time, politics was everywhere, everyone was active,” Braid recounted.

SFU was a radical campus and played a big role in the women’s movement. With International Women’s Day just behind us, now more than ever is an important time for us to remember just how influential our ladies have been.

The Early Days    

When SFU first opened its doors in 1965, women made up only 37 per cent of the student body. The faculty also held low representation of women, with only 16 women out of its 126 members.

The university lacked any childcare services for mothers on campus. As a result, mothers set up a childcare area within the AQ, volunteering approximately four hours a week to watch each others’ children.

Women lacked the opportunity to study topics that directly reflected or affected the things they encountered in their lives. The university, like most others at the time, offered no women’s studies or related areas of study.

SFU was the new university in the Lower Mainland, and had a reputation for hosting a politically active student population. Marcy Cohen, a founding member of the women’s movement on campus, remembers that women felt “there was a lack of democracy, [there was] inequality, [and] they felt invisible inside the student movement,” with male activists receiving all the credit.

The only housing option for women on campus, Madge Hogarth House, was closely regulated in ways that one would never encounter today. There were also high-profile incidents of “panty raids” in Madge where young male students, including photographers from The Peak, would break in and terrorize young women.

According to Hugh Johnson’s book Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University, SFU’s first chancellor, Gordon Shrum, publically held women’s athletics as pointless. At the opening of the university, there were no women’s intercollegiate athletic programs. By 1968, there were four women’s varsity teams (basketball, track, field hockey, and swimming) but they received almost no funding or support from the university.

The Beginnings of Change

The Women’s Caucus

Feeling discriminated against, women first began to organize what would eventually become known as the Women’s Caucus in the summer of 1968.

Following their first gathering, the headline “Pussy Power Strikes at SFU” was splashed across the front page of The Peak, calling the group “a diabolical plot.” This was the first occasion of student opposition to the women’s movement on campus, but it would not be the last.

The Women’s Caucus soon moved off campus to reach more women in the Greater Vancouver area.

As Cohen explained, the Caucus “didn’t want to work just on campus, [they] wanted to work in the community.”

The Caucus then began holding workshops “featuring a number of women academics, on a number of different issues, [. . . ] really opening the whole issue of women’s studies and women’s scholarship,” according to Shelley Rivkin, a student politician elected in the 1970s on a platform of bringing women’s studies to SFU.

The Women’s Caucus also provided one of the only sources of abortion counselling in Western Canada, and would receive calls from as far away as Saskatchewan for information.

Marcy Toms, founding member of the Women’s Caucus and prolific writer for The Peak, recalled the profoundness of what they were doing, as “[abortion counselling was] illegal, and [we] were doing it.”

In 1968, the Women’s Caucus placed one of the first ever advertisements for abortion counselling in The Peak reading “Girls — need help? In trouble?” and provided an address for the SFU Student Society, where the counselling took place.

In 1970, the Women’s Caucus and the SFSS agreed to send Caucus member Janiel Jolley as a protest contestant to the Miss Canadian University pageant held in Waterloo. The Caucus decided to take this route because a simple boycott would go unnoticed. Instead, Jolley took the microphone from the emcee and explained her opposition to contestants and university journalists from across Canada.

Not everyone at SFU was on board with this new movement.

“I’m sure that some guys were threatened,” Braid explained. “Not all women supported us by any means either.”

The Caucus certainly met with its fair share of mockery — their response to the degrading headline following their first meeting was printed by The Peak in between two photos of naked female breasts with the headline “Pussy Power Strikes Back.”    

Common labels bestowed on the female activists were bossy, unfeminine, and ‘ugly lesbians’ who hate men. As Peak contributor George Reamsbottom whined, they “are attempting to unite our sweet young mass of campus chics into a militant voting bloc.”

To be sure, women’s mobilization on campus was often radical, and at times militant.

“We were going into classes and disrupting them and encouraging people to join the strike,” Cohen reflected. “We were very militant in those days.”

However, many remained uncomfortable with the women’s movement. Braid remembers “a lot of skepticism about what women were talking about.”

Women’s Scholarship

On the academic front, large-scale changes were emerging in the early ‘70s. Facilitators of the Women’s Caucus workshops, such as Maggie Benston, were pushing for women’s studies courses to be offered at SFU.

The first women’s studies not-for-credit courses were provided by the Women’s Caucus. SFU professors Benston and Andrea Lebowitz were speakers at these lectures. Lebowitz went on to become the first coordinator of Women’s Studies at SFU.

Michael Elliot Hurst offered the first for-credit course at SFU on women’s issues in 1971, entitled “Geography of Gender.” SFU’s Women’s Studies Minor program, the second of its kind in Canada, emerged in 1975. There certainly was demand for the program, as it was “part of a broad movement of women starting to come into their own as scholars,” said Shelley Rivkin.

The SFSS was also quite receptive to the women’s movement on campus. In 1972, the SFSS voted 36–4 in support of bringing  women’s studies to SFU.

However, like any new stream of scholarship, it had its fair share of backlash.

“There was concern that there wasn’t going to be the content or the research to make [women’s studies] academically rigorous,”  Rivkin explained. “[Many believed that] by creating women’s studies, you would be diluting other forms of scholarship.”

By 1999–2000, almost 650 students were enrolled in over 40 Women’s Studies courses. Today, the department has multiple undergraduate programs, including a major, and offers master’s and PhD programs as well.

While SFU was one of the first universities to create a women’s studies program, they were also the very first to introduce “sexuality” to the study of gender (in 2009), renaming the Department of Women’s Studies the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

The Women’s Centre

In 1974, SFU saw the birth of the Women’s Centre, a product of activists whose values aligned with the off-campus Women’s Caucus.

The Centre became a 24/7 safe space for all self-identified women, with an adjoining library open to all SFU students. Described in The Peak’s 1980’s Women’s Day anthology, the centre was a place for “socializing with friends, resting, studying, nursing a baby, or talking about personal or social issues.” 

Past Women’s Centre volunteer and Collective member, Halimah Basrael, reflected on her time in the centre, explaining that, “If you know [the women’s centre] and are a part of it, [it] is feminism [. . .] but they construct it in many various ways.

“Sex positive, embracing, inclusive of other peoples’ orientations.” Basrael listed. “[It is] a space where everyone is accepted and feels comfortable.”

Although the centre did grow out of an atmosphere of activism, Basrael describes it as an important place for women of all backgrounds. “[The Women’s Centre] became much more diverse [. . . ]women [came] from everywhere.”

Sexual Harassment

Many people felt that sexual harassment was a key issue on university campuses. There was an emerging consciousness of this issue in the early days of SFU.

“We had just, for the first time ever, heard the term sexual harassment,” Braid explained. “So all of this was so new, and it was so exciting to have names for what was going on.

“[Sexual harassment] was really common and very acceptable,” Braid said of her early years at SFU. “And to not like it — you ‘were a bitch’, ‘you have no sense of humour,’” she explained.

Some things have changed, but many have stayed the same for women on campus. As Cohen explained, “there’s still a lot of violence against women and a lot of objectification of women [today].”

Chardaye Bueckert, President of the Simon Fraser Student Society, also described those same issues of sexual violence in the present day.

“Forty-four per cent of women in university face sexual violence and unwanted touching in their time at university,” Bueckert explained, citing statistics from the University of Ottawa. “But between 2009–2013 there were only nine instances of sexualized violence that was reported to the [SFU] administration.”

It’s clear that, while times may have changed, some issues have not disappeared from our cultural landscape.

Women in Politics

Yet another challenge that women still face today is a lack of representation within governing bodies.

“In terms of the SFSS, women, over the past four years, have only had 14 per cent representation on the executive of the student society, despite making up 54 per cent of the student body,”  Bueckert explained.

Bueckert says she feels that female representation in student politics is an important issue because women are hugely involved “in clubs on campus and departmental student unions, but the challenge is how that translates into the formal institutions of power.”

Why might there be such a hesitation for women to get involved in student politics? Bueckert cited her own experience with a discriminatory backlash to her campaign runs.

“When I was running for external relations officer,” she said, “a lot of my posters were defaced with what I would consider to be less than positive and certainly gender-[based] comments [. . .] comments on my appearance and my weight.

“I think that there is a pretty clear nexus between having [sexual violence] addressed and having women in student politics,” she added.

Despite its shortcomings, SFU administration was considered progressive in the 1970s, and still is today.

Pauline Jewett, SFU President from 1974–78, was the first female president of a co-ed university in Canada. She was very conscious of women’s issues on campus, and lent a helping hand to the budding Women’s Studies program and the Women’s Caucus.

This progressiveness has translated into the modern day as well. Currently, the SFSS is the only university in British Columbia with a female student body president (Bueckert) who was directly elected for the title in a general election.

Looking Forward

In terms of women’s rights, today’s campuses have come a long way, but women still face many challenges similar to their radical counterparts of times past.

Women’s leadership at SFU was groundbreaking on a national scale and prevailed through skepticism to bring more opportunities to the women of today.

The safety and representation of women are continuing issues on our campus, a campus that hosts a majority of female students.

Women’s scholarship transformed from relative obscurity in the early year, to something that is ever-growing and relevant.

We can today be sure that individual and collective self-identifying women will continue to fight for equality — keeping our radical campus forever progressive.