Overview

For more than 50 years, the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) has funded feminist scholarship at the University of Oregon. Our mission is simple: we create, fund, and share research that addresses the complicated nature of gender identities and inequalities.

Faculty and students affiliated with CSWS generate and share research with other scholars and educators, the public, policymakers, and activists. CSWS researchers come from a broad range of fields in arts and humanities, law and policy, social sciences, physical and life sciences, and the professional schools at the University of Oregon.

Over five decades, CSWS has published a variety of annual reports and newsletters detailing the Center’s activities and funded research. Historical research publications include Policy Matters and Policy Perspectives—a series of reports created by the CSWS Welfare Study Research Team intended for state policy makers about the effects of Welfare Reform in Oregon. PDFs of these and other CSWS print publications are archived here in the UO Libraries Scholars’ Bank and on the CSWS website .

CSWS History

In the early 1970s, a group of visionary University of Oregon scholars recognized the need to study, spotlight, and confront gender inequality throughout society. Joan Acker, Miriam Johnson, UO President Robert Clark, and other notable faculty founded the Center for the Sociological Study of Women (CSSW) in 1973, on the heels of Title IX of the Education Amendments, as women’s roles in the United States and elsewhere were undergoing massive changes. One of only two research centers on women in the nation at the time, CSSW had as its first project a study of the status of women at the UO.

In 1983, CSSW became the much larger Center for the Study of Women in Society, beneficiaries of a generous bequest from editor William Harris and journalist Jane Grant. An early feminist, Grant was active in women’s rights issues long before second-wave feminism. She was the first female news reporter for The New York Times and one of the originators of The New Yorker magazine. During the 1960s, Grant and Harris advocated for research on women before it generally became accepted in American academic life, but they were unsuccessful in establishing a women’s research center—until a UO librarian contacted Harris about archiving Grant’s papers after her death in 1972. At $3.5 million, the Harris-Grant endowment was at that time the biggest single gift ever awarded the UO—and it was all for the purpose of improving the status of women in society by increasing knowledge about women.

The papers of Jane Grant can be found in the UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. To learn more about the Center and its work, visit csws.uoregon.edu.