A Conversation with Feminist Teacher Editorial Collective

This issue marks the twenty-fifth volume of Feminist Teacher. In acknowledgment of this accomplishment, the founders and current members of the Feminist Teacher editorial collective have been in various conversations about the impact the journal has had on our own pedagogy and careers, as well as on the broader field of feminist pedagogy. The following conversation among the current collective members took place via phone conversation on June 3, 2015. Our coming double issue of 25.2–3 will include interviews with some of the founding members of the collective, including Sandy Runzo and Paula Krebs, both of whom are mentioned in this piece. Other founding and early members mentioned include Sue Lafky, Elisabeth Daumer, and Diane Ledger. Former members Aaronette White and Heather Laine Talley are also mentioned.

Monica Barron [MB], Gail Cohee [GC], Wendy Gunther-Canada [WG], Theresa Kemp [TK]

tk:

I’m wondering, should we start by each of us going around and saying how we got involved with the journal?

mb:

Yeah, I think that’s a good place to start.

all of us, chuckling:

Gail, you want to start us as a founding mother?

gc:

I’m not a founding mother. I got involved with the journal because I knew everybody on it in the English Department [at Indiana University, Bloomington], so Sandy and Elisabeth, Paula and Sue. And also John Clower was sort of involved, and there were lots of people who volunteered, and so what I did at first—probably fairly soon after it was started, within the first couple of years—I just helped do proofreading sometimes because they used to do the double proofreading. One would look while the other one read out loud. And so I think that’s how I first started, and then sometimes I would read manuscripts I think but really I first was just a volunteer. Cause I didn’t really want to do it.

mb:

Has that changed?

gc:

Off and on.

tk:

Is that our title? I didn’t really want to do it?

gc:

I didn’t really mean to do this! Oh my gosh, I didn’t mean to do this. But um . . . and then at some point when they decided—this must have been the mid-’80s—they decided to have book review editors. Jeanne Kerl and I became the first, I think the first co-editors of book reviews. And so I took that part of it with me when I went to my first job in Emporia, Kansas. So, that’s the beginning, but I wasn’t on the Collective.

mb:

Theresa, were you next?

tk:

Yeah, I think maybe I was next, so I was volunteering like Gail, and I think Gail might have been the one to get me volunteering. So my first things were . . . [MB: so you didn’t want to do it, either—all of us laughing] No, I did want to do it—there were also people in the feminist theory reading group, so those were part of my first memories of that, too. I got to IU in ’86, so probably around ’87 or so—I don’t remember the number, but I remember the cover of the first issue of FT I ever got. But I helped stuff envelopes back when we did the bulk mailing, and I helped put labels on everything. I helped do that kind of stuff, and then my memory of it wasn’t that I did any proofreading, but maybe I did because I remember doing like Gail says, we did the paired proofreading, and I was doing that for the Linguistics Club, too, for money—that was one of my jobs there in grad school, but then I think I was the first graduate student intern for FT because I was able to give up teaching one of my classes each semester and manage the business office part of the journal because I think Sandy and then Gail left—all the graduate students who started it were leaving for jobs.

gc:

Paula and I left the same year.

tk:

But people were somehow around to...