ABSTRACT
The 1970s was the decade in which research and teaching on women’s lives became a burgeoning enterprise in America’s colleges and universities. With the support of the Ford Foundation, research centers dedicated to this topic were established at a number of universities, including Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Arizona.1 By the 1980s, at least fifty centers were in operation across the country. Some were Washington-based policy centers, such as the Equity Policy Center, the International Center for Research in Women, the Program of Policy Research on Women and Families, and the Center for Women Policy Studies. Others, like the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers (founded in 1971) and the Wellesley Center, which began in 1974 with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, were campusbased centers that served as collaborative research space for faculty, homes for visiting scholars, and incubators for scholarly and curricular innovation.2 In 1982, the National Council for Research on Women was founded to help coordinate, record, and publicize the work of these centers.
