Item Information
Title
Dr. Margaret O’Connor, former Professor of English at UNC, from an oral history conducted in 1987.
Description
Dr. Margaret O’Connor, former Professor of English at UNC, from an oral history conducted in 1987. Performed by Aubrey Snowden, with Gwendolyn Schwinke as interviewer.
Creator
PlayMaker’s Repertory Company in collaboration with the University Archives at Louis Round Wilson Library
Source
Interview with Margaret Anne O'Connor by Pamela Dean, 1 July 1987 L-0031, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Series L: University of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/04007L/
https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/04007L/
Date
2021
Language
English
Identifier
https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/items/show/7586
Transcription
Dr. Margaret O’Connor, former Professor of English at UNC, from an oral history conducted in 1987.
Interviewer: Tell me about your Women in Literature course…
MO: At the end of that first semester, [my department chairman] asked me if I would teach a course for Hinton James dormitory, which had recently opened and which, like Carmichael dormitory, apparently was trying to integrate a living and learning situation in this new residence hall. The students had asked specifically for a course in Women in Literature. I'd done a dissertation on a woman writer. I certainly was not familiar with the kinds of questions, the kinds of issues, that come up either in a Women's Studies course or a Women in Literature course today. But nobody else had been trained in that area either, and so I thought, "Well, I might as well." It was really exciting. I had twenty-five students.
There's always the "everybody's doing it," which works when you're four years old and works when you're thirty as well. "Everybody else has one. Why can't we have one?" I think that there were two major rationales. One was remediation, to offer a course that would give information and a perspective that was simply unavailable in any other part of the University. A second major reason was research and movement into a new area, that UNC had not just gone along with the crowd in the past, that we'd always been an innovator and that we, as much as the University was behind in this area, that it also offered the kind of spirit that could, with a feeling of good will, just move toward change and make some very positive changes and really become a leader.
Interviewer: Were there many women in the faculty at that time?
MO: At the time I arrived, they had let their single woman go the year before I arrived, and they hired one woman, as an assistant professor, the year I came as an instructor. So that was one out of approximately sixty. That's unusual for an English Department because at least one third of all Ph.D.'s. given every year in English are given to women, and here at UNC we've been giving women Ph.D.'s. since about 1910. Clearly, hiring women was not a priority. Let me understate it that way.
I feel like I was on every committee at the University my first five years here. It's such a different world for the women at UNC now. Back then there were so few women that most of them were run ragged by multiple committee assignments. Women would find themselves on two or three University committees and still be saying "no" to serving on a fourth. The fourth committee chair would then say, "Well, we tried to get a woman but we couldn't find one who was willing to serve."
60 secs
Interviewer: Did you encounter opposition to a women’s studies program or women students?
In some ways, there was some question about women that really struck at the heart of the institution. You would have to check, but my impression of my first few years here was that a large number of the University administrators, in particular, and the administrators of specific departments were UNC-Chapel Hill graduates. They had a sense of this institution as male. It was a part of their memory as well as their present and their futures. I really felt that they believed that a change in standards, a change in values, would be a lowering and that, inevitably, there was a fear of anything that might disrupt the status quo.
Interviewer: So you wouldn't make any blanket statements that men were the enemy in this situation?
MO: Men were in charge, and the people in charge were the enemy. What can I say? There were no women. I'll be happy to share the blame, but you'd have to go back and revise your statement. And I think it's absolutely true that many of the men woke up and looked around themselves and saw a lot of people just like them who agreed with them one hundred percent. There really weren't many ways that new faces, male or female, could break into that system. I still feel that very few women, VERY few women, have broken into that ring.
Interviewer: So, when the Women’s Studies course was proposed….
MO: I remember Maynard Adams talking about the fact that if we had a Women's Studies course, it might increase the amount of anomie. I hate to admit it, but that was the first time that I'd really heard this term, which Sociology and Psychology Departments have been batting around, apparently, for years. He talked about male anomie, this sense of being left out, isolated, and I just sat there and looked at the other powerless women in this group and thought this is insane! This is ridiculous! (Laughter)
Interviewer: Tell me about your Women in Literature course…
MO: At the end of that first semester, [my department chairman] asked me if I would teach a course for Hinton James dormitory, which had recently opened and which, like Carmichael dormitory, apparently was trying to integrate a living and learning situation in this new residence hall. The students had asked specifically for a course in Women in Literature. I'd done a dissertation on a woman writer. I certainly was not familiar with the kinds of questions, the kinds of issues, that come up either in a Women's Studies course or a Women in Literature course today. But nobody else had been trained in that area either, and so I thought, "Well, I might as well." It was really exciting. I had twenty-five students.
There's always the "everybody's doing it," which works when you're four years old and works when you're thirty as well. "Everybody else has one. Why can't we have one?" I think that there were two major rationales. One was remediation, to offer a course that would give information and a perspective that was simply unavailable in any other part of the University. A second major reason was research and movement into a new area, that UNC had not just gone along with the crowd in the past, that we'd always been an innovator and that we, as much as the University was behind in this area, that it also offered the kind of spirit that could, with a feeling of good will, just move toward change and make some very positive changes and really become a leader.
Interviewer: Were there many women in the faculty at that time?
MO: At the time I arrived, they had let their single woman go the year before I arrived, and they hired one woman, as an assistant professor, the year I came as an instructor. So that was one out of approximately sixty. That's unusual for an English Department because at least one third of all Ph.D.'s. given every year in English are given to women, and here at UNC we've been giving women Ph.D.'s. since about 1910. Clearly, hiring women was not a priority. Let me understate it that way.
I feel like I was on every committee at the University my first five years here. It's such a different world for the women at UNC now. Back then there were so few women that most of them were run ragged by multiple committee assignments. Women would find themselves on two or three University committees and still be saying "no" to serving on a fourth. The fourth committee chair would then say, "Well, we tried to get a woman but we couldn't find one who was willing to serve."
60 secs
Interviewer: Did you encounter opposition to a women’s studies program or women students?
In some ways, there was some question about women that really struck at the heart of the institution. You would have to check, but my impression of my first few years here was that a large number of the University administrators, in particular, and the administrators of specific departments were UNC-Chapel Hill graduates. They had a sense of this institution as male. It was a part of their memory as well as their present and their futures. I really felt that they believed that a change in standards, a change in values, would be a lowering and that, inevitably, there was a fear of anything that might disrupt the status quo.
Interviewer: So you wouldn't make any blanket statements that men were the enemy in this situation?
MO: Men were in charge, and the people in charge were the enemy. What can I say? There were no women. I'll be happy to share the blame, but you'd have to go back and revise your statement. And I think it's absolutely true that many of the men woke up and looked around themselves and saw a lot of people just like them who agreed with them one hundred percent. There really weren't many ways that new faces, male or female, could break into that system. I still feel that very few women, VERY few women, have broken into that ring.
Interviewer: So, when the Women’s Studies course was proposed….
MO: I remember Maynard Adams talking about the fact that if we had a Women's Studies course, it might increase the amount of anomie. I hate to admit it, but that was the first time that I'd really heard this term, which Sociology and Psychology Departments have been batting around, apparently, for years. He talked about male anomie, this sense of being left out, isolated, and I just sat there and looked at the other powerless women in this group and thought this is insane! This is ridiculous! (Laughter)