Ruth Nemzoff is soft spoken and endearing as she invites me to join her on a couch outside her office. It is hard to imagine that this warm, peaceful woman has led a battle against chauvinistic patriarchal tradition and fought for the rights of women across the nation for the past three decades.Roberta Salper, with bright red hair and a big, genuine smile, is equally animated and good-natured sitting inside her office, preparing to write the history of her life as a feminist researcher.

Nemzoff and Salper are two of three Women's Studies Research Center scholars, including Paula Doress-Worters, who are featured in Barbara Love's Feminists Who Changed America: 1963-1975, published last fall.

Nemzoff majored in American studies at Barnard College. but it was not until years after graduation that she commenced her involvement in the feminist movement.

In slow, reminiscing words, Nemzoff recounts the road that led to her role as a feminist activist. "I hired a young girl-a high school student-to come in on the afternoons" to help with the children. "She walks in on the third day with the book The Feminine Mystique and says, 'You need to read this.' I read that book and it really made me think."

After reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Nemzoff was inspired to join a women's consciousness-raising group and then to start a new series of groups when she moved to New Hampshire. In 1975, Nemzoff was elected to the New Hampshire State legislature, where she served as Democratic minority leader until 1981. Even within the political sphere, Nemzoff remembers encountering gender-based resistance.

"When I ran," Nemzoff reflects, her eyes growing wide as she envisions once more the struggles involved in her campaign, "all people were interested in was that I was the doctor's wife."

Recently Nemzoff published several articles about her experiences as a woman in politics, one specifically about being pregnant while serving in the legislature.

A conference she attended about four years ago, held by the Association for Research on Mothering, motivated Nemzoff to begin her own research on being a mother. "It made me realize that mothering was a feminist issue," she says.

Nemzoff says she was inspired by her relationship with her own children to focus specifically on the topic of parenting older children.

Looking back on a lifetime of dedication to feminism, Nemzoff reports that a tremendous amount of change has occurred. Not only is there greater equality between men and women, she says, but also progress has been made in the study of women and gender itself.

Other academic areas have seen a significant change as well, as they increasingly begin to recognize the women in their fields. "Even mainstream courses have changed in that many-not all-now include women's writings," Nemzoff says.

Nemzoff is currently an adjunct assistant professor of international studies at Bentley College. She joined the Brandeis WSRC in 1997 after the center had only been open for a few years. Previously, she worked at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.

"There's a very interesting emphasis on activism," Nemzoff says about the WSRC. "Research for research's sake isn't as interesting as research combined with activism."

Nemzoff continues to pursue this medley of research and activism as an ambitious leader of the feminist movement. She reflects carefully before summarizing her overarching goal as a modern feminist: "Improving the lives of people and making the world a better place."



'Inventing a field'

Love's book also highlights the work of Roberta Salper, who joined the WSRC in fall 2006.

She was a pioneer in the field of women's studies. While a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Pittsburgh, Salper was given two graduate students and the funding to establish an experimental class on women's studies.

"In January 1970, I taught the first women's studies course to be taught in the country," Salper says.

Later that year, San Diego State University opened the first women's studies center in the world. The university searched for just one professor of women's studies, but, "nobody had the academic credentials," Salper remembers.

After she was referred to the university, Salper laughingly boasts, "I became the first full-time faculty member ever hired in women's studies."

The 10 courses offered in women's studies filled rapidly, Salper reports: Approximately 95 women and five men were the first students to enroll.

Salper remembers encountering significant obstacles. "It was a very tumultuous year because no one had ever done this before," she says. "We had to fight a lot of hostile faculty because they said women were not a legitimate subject of study."

Salper said there were even difficulties in teaching the course itself. "There were no books on women," she says.

Nevertheless, the thrill of progress and rebellion surrounded the course. "We were really inventing a field," Salper says.

Salper has written prolifically on women's studies. She edited the 1971 anthology Female Liberation: History and Current Politics, which compares historical feminism with that between 1968 and 1970.

Salper also published a book on gender studies and Spanish literature, based upon her experience living in Spain in the 1960s.

Since arriving at the WSRC last fall, Salper has spent time working on her memoir, which focuses on "the making of a female activist in the United States." She predicts that it will take another year to complete.

While she acknowledges that the feminist movement has made many strides in the last 40 years, Salper is still dedicated to resolving the many injustices she claims still exist. One such problem is the "objectification of women's bodies for commercial benefit."

Additionally, Salper mentions (WC) that "women are at the very, very bottom of the economic scale. There are poor men and women, but the women are always worse off."

Salper says it is especially problematic "that the thought of having a woman president should even be an issue. Countries all over the world have women leaders."

Yet Salper is optimistic about the future of the feminist movement. She shares Nemzoff's humanistic idealism in citing the ultimate objective of her feminist research as reaching a point where "women have enough influence to make this country be more progressive in regards to both women and men."

Paula Doress-Worters, who was unavailable for interview, co-authored Our Bodies, Ourselves and founded the Ernestine Rose Society in memory of the nineteenth-century feminist by the same name.