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FLICKERING CLUSTERS - 3
beyond. She was, in her own words, "an agitator of the university administration
and an organizer of women at the University of Wisconsin beginning in 1970,"
who "worked consistently toward the establishment of women's studies
on campus
and the UW System, a goal that was accomplished in 1975."2 It was in
this role
that I came to know Ruth Bleier in the 1970s. As a young faculty member in
one of
the comprehensive institutions in the UW System, I was mainly intent on develop-
ing my teaching and research with tenure as my goal. While I had already
been
affected by discrimination as both a student and a faculty member, I was
blissfully
unaware of or had shut my eyes to such experiences.3 It was at this time
that Ruth
was visiting campuses across the state, raising the consciousnesses of women
faculty,
staff, and students in every institution in the UW System with multiple results.
I
was, perhaps, typical among my women peers (few that they were) in that I
began
to become aware of the promise of Women's Studies and feminist scholarship,
both in terms of my own professional goals and of working with other women
in
the UW System to achieve common goals. Joining with Ruth in her organizing
efforts, UW women formed a systemwide Coordinating Council of Women in
Higher Education and, by 1975, a network of individual Women's Studies pro-
grams in each of the fifteen institutions in the UW System. That network
has con-
tinued to function and, in 1989, became officially constituted as the UW
System
Women's Studies Consortium.
As the author of three definitive books on the hypothalamus in animals, the
germinal work Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories
on
Women,4 and other writings, Ruth Bleier's contributions as a scientist and,
in
particular, in the area of women and science have been widely known for many
years. At UW-Madison, she was instrumental in the formation of the October
29th Group, a circle of scientists and other women which met over a period
of
years "to discuss and define a feminist critique of science."5
In their introduction
to her last address, delivered for her on January 4, 1988, a month before
she was
to die of cancer, Judith Walzer Leavitt and Linda Gordon paid tribute to
Ruth's
contributions as a beloved colleague and feminist activist and, on a national
and
international level, as a scholar:
Among the first scholars in the United States to examine critically the founda-
tions of the modem biological sciences from a feminist perspective, Ruth
has
provided important insights and direction to other scholars. Women's Studies
courses around the country use her articles and books to provide students
with
core understandings of the complex issues regarding women's nature, biologi-
cal determinism, and the nature of sex differences. Based on her own scientific
work in neurophysiology as it relates to the biological sciences, as well
as to
psychology, sociology, political theory, and anthropology, Ruth Bleier's
work
was truly interdisciplinary and integrative. (p. 183)