Bridget Smith Pieschel heard a certain message in one of Gov. Tate Reeves’ comments during his State of the State address on Monday.
Among Reeves’ updates on Mississippi’s foster system, prison system and other issues affecting the state, Reeves appeared to fire a barb at Pieschel’s field.
“In Mississippi, we know that there is pride in a trade,” said Reeves, who earned his degree in economics from the liberal arts Millsaps College in Jackson. “We know that there is money to be made. We can let the east coast have their ivory towers. We can let the west coast have a generation of gender studies majors. We will take more jobs and higher pay.”
Pieschel is an English professor and the founder and director of the Center for Women’s Research and Public Policy at the Mississippi University for Women. The women’s studies program at MUW has received more and more applicants over time, she said.
“It’s not that people aren’t eager to come here and pay tuition (to study this),” she said. “That’s not the issue. The issue, apparently, for the governor is what they learn.”
At Mississippi State University, gender studies “examines the construction of gender in a variety of cultures and in different historical epochs” and how the social and cultural construction of gender shapes people’s lives, careers, institutions and policies, according to MSU website. The field examines how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, sexual orientation, nationality and other identities and what causes unequal opportunities and outcomes for women compared to men.
“Approaches from these angles may examine the gender pay gap, sexual violence, gaps in athletic or education opportunity, or why so few women enter STEM fields,” Mississippi State University Director of Gender Studies Kimberly Kelly said.
Additionally, many of the issues Reeves mentioned in his address, such as teacher pay, child welfare and violence within prisons, “cannot be understood without an appreciation of the role of gender in creating such problems or devising solutions,” Kelly said.
Pieschel is a Mississippi native, has taught at MUW for 40 years and will retire in May. She said Reeves’ implication that gender studies scholars belong on the coast was not only false but also a dog whistle to his more conservative constituents. The comment resembles the way some politicians talked about African Americans’ fight for civil rights, she said.
“This is not just something out of the blue,” she said. “It’s something that has existed as far back as the Reconstruction Era, the fight to keep African Americans from the vote and from education, the attempt to suppress women from having free public education.”
MSU offers a gender studies minor for undergraduates and a certificate for graduate students, and 30 and 15 students are enrolled respectively, Kelly said. Izzy Pellegrine, a Jackson native and a sociology PhD candidate at MSU, completed both the minor as an undergraduate and the certificate as a master’s student.
“If we think of Mississippi as a state with immediately pressing issues related to social outcomes and inequalities, this is the exact right place to have higher-level training in issues around social inequalities,” Pellegrine said.
The scope of the field
Five students at MUW will graduate in May with a master’s degree in women’s leadership, a program Pieschel started in fall 2015. She spearheaded the women’s studies degree program for undergraduates as well. Part of MUW’s mission is to incorporate women’s studies into every degree program, so Pieschel said she resisted creating a separate one at first, “but gradually I came to understand that we can do both, and it was time.”
The program is interdisciplinary, meaning it spans a variety of fields of study, from politics and business to literature.
Gender studies can be useful in STEM fields as well, Kelly said.
“Engineering fields, for example, increasingly consider gender dynamics when designing projects or creating research teams,” she said.
Career paths in gender studies are less “rigidly predictable” than STEM careers, but employers value the critical thinking skills that a gender studies education provides, Kelly said.
“Who wants an employee who can’t write clearly or think through a complicated workplace issue?” she said. “Who doesn’t want an employee who can appreciate that there are multiple perspectives and potential solutions to a workplace challenge?”
Impact on students
The bachelor’s and master’s programs at MUW both attract international students, including senior women’s studies major Salina Rai from Nepal and second-year women’s leadership master’s student Bassant Mahmoud from Egypt. Both said they have seen blatant displays of sexism and misogyny in their home countries and hope to return there to use their degrees for women’s rights advocacy work. Mahmoud said she specifically sought a graduate program focused on women’s leadership and appreciates the interdisciplinary approach to the field.
Rai, who wants to work for the United Nations, said the women’s studies courses at MUW have brought her own implicit biases to her attention.
“Despite our desires for equality, it’s possible that we can bear and perpetuate subtle sexist behaviors ourselves,” Rai said. “I can say the courses have helped me to bring change within myself.”
MUW alumna Elaine Brightman finished a bachelor’s degree in English with a women’s studies minor in December. She said she compiled a feminist anthology featuring “a number of inter-generational women from a variety of different backgrounds” as a research project last year, and she now lives in Nashville, Tennessee and works in publishing.
Melanie Walsh completed the gender studies minor at MSU and said the field is important to her career path of mental health counseling, in which she is pursuing a PhD. She teaches the Introduction to Gender Studies course, which attracts students in several majors. She said an elementary education major could use a minor in gender studies to create healthy dynamics between children in the classroom.
“It’s super applicable for anyone who’s going to be working with children and families to make sure that we’re not just continuing stereotypical narratives surrounding what we think men and women should look like,” Walsh said.
Walsh and Pellegrine authored Mississippi’s first LGBTQ needs assessment, which generated data for philanthropic organizations to inform their awarding of grants pertaining to LGBTQ issues.
Mahmoud and Brightman agreed that Reeves’ comments were disdainful and showed a lack of understanding of the field of gender studies.
“I am calling for Tate Reeves to step out of his ivory tower and realize his irrational positions regarding gender, education and politics are only creating more wage and job disparities and are perpetuating far more ‘malicious myth’ than he will ever realize,” Brightman said.
Pieschel said people in power tend to get defensive when presented with ideas they do not understand.
“When you say things that push back against old ideas, you’re going to get reactions,” she said.
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