The Graduate School and University Center
of The City University of New York

Center for the Study of Women and Society / Box 135-192
Graduate Center: 33 West 42 Street, New York, N.Y. 10036-8099
212 790-4435

January 8, 1985

Alison Bernstein
Program Officer
The Ford Foundation
320 East 43rd Street
New York, N.Y. 10017

Dear Alison:

Here is the finai report on the grant from the Ford Foundation,
"Center for the Study of Women and Sex Roles: Planning for the
Future" (11/1/80 - 18/31/83). I thought I had sent it long ago,
and was very embarrassed to discover I had not. I am sorry for
any inconvenience this delay might have caused.

Best wishes for the New Year.

Sincerely,

Mary Brown Parlee
Associate Professor, Psychology

MBP: jr
Enc,


FINAL REPORT
Center for the Study of Women and Sex Roles: Planning for the Future
November 1, 1980 — August 31, 1983

Mary Brown Parlee, Principal Investigator
(Director, Center for the Study of Women and Society, 1979 - 1984)

As a result of work over the two and one half years of the project
period, the Center for the Study of Women and Society, began to G/ os
serve, in fact, the functions it was established eaiete tees perforn. asws
It began to act as a focus for coordinated activity among faculty and
students throughout the 2l-campus City University of New York. This
occurred through the newsletter, the newly-formed CUNY Feminist Network
with its annual conference and more frequent meetings, the directory
of CUNY feminist.researchers and scholars, and renewed interest among
faculty in working toward increased communication and coordination
of research and Women's Studies activities among the campuses.

The development of a continuing, visible organizational structure
to facilitate and support women's research and other activities at
CUNY was a necessary first stage in our effort to reach out to the
other institutions and populations in New York City and to integrate
various research into mainstream teaching and research within the
university. During the project period, this outreach effort was
most successfully focused in two sets of activities.

In the area of health concerns, one of the principal research
foci of the Center, substantial connections with researchers at
Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (a part of CUNY) began to bear fruit,
not only in the form of our highly successful seminar series, but
also in identification of individual researchers who now have appoint-
ments at both Mt. Sinai and at the Graduate Center or other CUNY
campuses. A group of women has also formed at Mt. Sinai and has received
funding to assess the feasibility of establishing a research group
in Community Psychiatry. The Center was represented in these discus-—
sions by Charlotte Muller, a member of our Executive Committee, and I
kept in touch with the organizers (Myrna Weiss, Marcia Hurst, Sam
Bloom). Once the group is established at Mt. Sinai, closer coor-
dination with the Center at the Graduate Center will be formalized.
Our hope is that this will strengthen not only joint research efforts,
but also the emergence of a coordinated graduate curriculum in
health and the behavioral sciences (which continues to be discussed
at the Graduate Center), a curriculum in which women's health issues
would be an integral part from the beginning.


FINAL REPORT - PAGE 2

Center for the Study of Women and Sex Roles: Planning for the Future

The second way in which the Center's outreach activities began to
pay off was through the CUNY Feminist Network and through related
efforts that I participated in with a group of research center and
women’s studies directors in the New York metropolitan area. The
CUNY Feminist Network is a broad-based, grass-roots group of CUNY
faculty and students who meet to discuss both intellectual/personal/
political issues around the integration of sex, race, and class
perspectives in the content and forms of academic life and also
political actions in support of women and minorities at CUNY.

In the meetings of the Network there was an excitement that
I think has been too often missing in feminist scholarship and women's
studies recently: a feeling of creative excitement and personal
commitment to the role of intellectual activity in the struggle for
social justice. In my experience, it is groups of this kind that
most consistently focus on the interconnectedness of issues around
gender, race, and class, and which know and act on the understanding
that the body of researchers and scholars has to be diverse ( in race,
age, sexual orientation, and the like) if the body of knowledge produced
in the academy is to be true and useful for effecting social change.

In these and many other ways, the Center for the Study of Women
and Society at CUNY's Graduate Center has begun to serve as the kind
of coordinating, facilitating umbrella organization for CUNY that
was planned at its inception. Our need now is to strengthen these
ongoing activities into projects and project proposals and to plan
systematically both for expansion and for more effective coordination
over the next few years.