“This is not for women only,” Estelle Freedman, professor emeritus of history, said of feminist studies. “This is the study of sexual inequality and distinctions about gender, so we called it feminist studies.”
Freedman co-founded the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, an interdisciplinary department combining history, feminist studies and American studies, and taught at the department for over four decades, from 1976 to 2021.
“She has always been, in my view, a model of the best kind of feminist scholar — someone as humble as she is accomplished, who takes pride in guiding and nurturing younger scholars,” colleague and English professor Shelley Fishkin wrote in an email to The Daily.
When Freedman joined Stanford in 1976, she committed herself to the then-new field of women’s history, working with the Center for Research on Women (now known as the Clayman Institute for Gender Research) to create a feminist studies program.
After 10 years as an individually designed major, the University approved the program for degree-granting status, renaming it Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2013.
“It’s not a big program, but the quality is amazing and the things that the students do with these degrees is extraordinary,” Freedman said.
Growing up during the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement, Anti-War movement and Women’s Rights movement, Freedman found herself curious about the questions of “when, why and how mobilizations for social change took place,” she said.
Freedman fell in love with historical research after writing her undergraduate honors thesis on the historical origins of Black separatism in the Back-to-Africa movement and graduate dissertation on the origins of separate women’s prisons in America. The past, according to Freedman, helped her “contextualize” what she was living through in the present.
Arjan Walia ’22 M.S. ’23 noted this commitment to the present, writing in an email to The Daily that Freedman “has always been excited to teach about the past in exciting, new ways and to grow her scholarship and mentorship to meet the moment.”
Encouraged by professors of history Annette Baxter and Gerda Lerner to answer “contemporary concerns” using the study of history, Freedman turned to teaching.
“If you want to study history and write about it, you become a history professor,” Freedman said. And luckily, she loved it.
Zoe Mahony ’20, one of Freedman’s former students, currently teaches high school history and still uses “The Essential Feminist Reader” — a compilation of documents from FEMGEN 101: Introduction to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies — “to find sources to share with the kids,” Mahony wrote in an email to The Daily.
At Stanford, Freedman has taught a number of courses, drawing from subjects like history, anthropology, political science and economics. She sometimes assigns fiction and poetry to her students, hoping to “give life and emotion to” the changes people experience related to gender, she said.
Freedman also incorporates music, photos and documentary clips into her curriculum to capture the full attention of the class and “make the past come alive,” Walia wrote.
A singer of folk music and guitarist since she was young, Freedman also weaved folk singing with feminist studies for her upcoming documentary, “Singing for Justice,” which shares the life of American folk singer and activist Faith Petric.
Freedman was a member of Petric’s folk club, the San Francisco Folk Music Club, which Petric hosted in her home on Friday nights. Freedman, who conducted an oral history on Petric, said Petric’s life was “historically significant in ways that I had not known.”
Freedman hopes that Petric’s story will show audience members lifelong civic engagement and musical joy.
“She just kept singing, touring and marching in the streets for every cause that she believed in,” Freedman said.
Freedman also sees the documentary as an alternative to today’s commercialized music, by spotlighting “people making music for free and for fun.”
Co-directed with film producer Christie Herring M.A. ’05, the documentary was screened live in San Francisco on Feb. 22 and is set to broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member station KQED on March 14 for Women’s History Month.
“It’s working people whose recreation and passion is to sing together, and very often they tended to, like Faith, be singing for justice,” Freedman said.
Freedman always ended her last HISTORY 161: The Politics of Sex: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Modern America class with folk singing, too. Bringing her guitar, she sang with students about elements from the course, from girl group songs to early 20th century anthems about strikes to Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid.”
Because Freedman taught HISTORY 161 in the spring, she said she recalled many seniors saying to her, “This was my last Stanford class — what a way to go out.”