As the Coming of Age project continues into a third year, I continue to learn so much from students and participants about the benefits and pitfalls of multimedia technology, the diversity of women’s lives, and how to be a more effective teacher of women’s studies. I am extraordinarily grateful for all the participants and assistants who bring the website to life.
As I make changes to the course, and as we collaboratively expand and improve the Coming of Age website, some of the questions we consider remain constant: What was it like to grow up female in the past? Has coming of age changed from generation to generation? What memories stand out in the minds of women who grew up in previous decades? What do they want young people to know? But new questions have arisen as well: What is the relationship between gender and technology? (This we explore through readings and reflections about our own ideas and perceptions of our technological competence.) How do our conceptions of growing up, “coming of age,” and telling our stories differ?
While the project remains fundamentally connected to women’s experiences of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, I have grown to appreciate that students’ curiosities are not limited to this phase of life. Pressing questions, I believe, emanate from my students’ experiences, opinions, and concerns about their adulthood: What choices have you made about work, family, and relationships? What are your opinions about young people today, parenting, gender differences, gay and lesbian issues, religion, race, and politics? Who takes out the garbage? If there’s anything you could change about your life, what would it be and why?
At first, such questions seemed to me to be a failure to understand the assignment, which, as I conceived it, was to consist of oral histories focused on growing up. I have now come to understand students’ redirection of questioning, however, as resistance to an agenda that isolates youth from the entirety of a woman’s life. I have also come to appreciate that students are taking this opportunity to talk openly and honestly about issues from women’s studies with other adult women. I am both gratified by the fact that students see such dialogue with women as important, and disappointed to realize that such conversations are rare among so many women, especially across generations. Still, it makes me hopeful that students are learning to take interest in women’s lives and viewpoints, and learning to listen to what women have to say about themselves and society as well. Taking other women’s lives seriously and valuing their contributions to society is an important step toward recognition of one’s own life and thoughts as significant. The undergraduate students I work with each semester remind me that our culture fails, by and large, to recognize the complexity of women’s lives as well as their struggles and accomplishments.
Those who have visited the website in its earlier iteration will recognize other changes over time. We have added a new batch of pages, and, thanks to the dedication of our web developer Mahesh Adhikari, the pages are now easier to navigate and organized in a way that gives options to viewers who wish to view pages by clicking on a thumbnail image or by choosing from lists sorted by name, date of birth, hometown, or the year/class that produced them. And whereas the project began with a Minnesota focus and sought primarily older women as subjects, students have added a number of women with backgrounds from outside Minnesota and outside the U.S., as well as a number of young women born since the 1980s.
Tremendous thanks go to the women who were willing to be interviewed and featured on the site; the students who worked so hard to produce the materials; and the people who provided technical support and expertise. Hassan Hemani, Sajan Dhakal, and Mahesh Adhikari have devoted hundreds of hours to creating and revising the site design; and Jerry Anderson has continuously provided instruction and assistance with video uploading and editing. The project got started with a mini-grant from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The Department of Women’s Studies, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Women’s Center, as well as colleagues, administrators and friends too numerous to name, have also facilitated the project in a number of ways.
Professor Susan Freeman
January 2007
