Carol Stabile, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, and Gabriela Martinez, the center’s associate director.

The UO’s Center for the Study of Women in Society got its start with a gift on behalf of early feminist Jane Grant— a gift that, at the time, was the largest the university had ever received from a single donor

How can you measure the impact of a gift to the University of Oregon?

In the case of the UO’s Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS), try time-traveling back four decades to a time when gender inequality was rampant and an academic research center on the subject of women was nothing short of radical. Then read about Jane C. Grant, a pioneering woman reporter at The New York Times before she cofounded The New Yorker in 1925. Grant fought for a woman’s right to keep her name in marriage and cofounded the Lucy Stone League, a precursor of the 1960s women’s liberation movement.

Now switch coasts and fast-forward to 1974, when Ed Kemp, UO special collections librarian, contacted Grant’s widower, retired Fortune literary editor William B. Harris, about acquiring the papers of his late wife. Harris not only donated her papers to the UO library but also changed his will to bestow a $3.5 million endowment to the university for the study of women.

As graduate student Jenée Wilde, a coordinator of the CSWS fortieth anniversary events, said, “The Harris gift could have ended up anywhere, but because certain people at the UO recognized the value and need to invest in women, the university received an incredible legacy.”

At the time, it was the largest contribution from a single donor the university had ever received. With the endowment, what had begun as a small center in the Department of Sociology was expanded to become the CSWS, with a mission to generate, support, and disseminate research on women.

And now, as the CSWS celebrates forty years, its leaders reflect on their gratitude for the ability to carry on Jane Grant’s work through research, scholarship, teaching, and activism.

“This is one of just a few endowed women’s centers in the nation,” said Director Carol Stabile. “It’s kind of dizzying, the impact that the William Harris gift has had on the UO and beyond.”

The CSWS supports a wide range of interdisciplinary research across campus, enabling thousands of faculty members and graduate students to do research around the world.

And for the next forty years?

The “CSWS will continue to enhance and expand its programs,” Stabile said, “responding to changes in how we think about gender and gender equality as well as continued efforts to address social inequalities. We’ve seen incredible progress over the past forty years, but there’s still much work to be done.”

—Cheri O’Neil ’79