{"id":7640,"date":"2014-09-18T05:00:53","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T10:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=7640"},"modified":"2014-09-17T20:44:33","modified_gmt":"2014-09-18T01:44:33","slug":"life-goal-make-my-dad-a-hard-core-feminist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2014\/09\/18\/life-goal-make-my-dad-a-hard-core-feminist\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLife Goal: Make My Dad a Hard-Core Feminist\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2013, I became the director of an unusual gender center. This is its story.<\/i><\/p>\n

September 18, 2014<\/p>\n

My Girl w\/ Pen<\/a> column is called \u201cGenderLab\u201d<\/a> or watch what happens when you run one of the most unusual gender centers in the country. That sounds hyperbolic. I know because I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m living it. As we are about to finish year one today, I\u2019ve come up for enough air to document this experiment. And this year I\u2019m going to be writing about it.<\/p>\n

\"Kurt<\/a>
Kurt Voss & Daughter Cassandra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The heart of our center is a story of father\/daughter love. You heard that right. Not an abstract story about rights and politics–though we know from Women\u2019s Studies that those things are also personal. But ours starts with the personal. This is a story of love across difference. Of grief and transformation. Of a father who listened to his daughter and a daughter who stayed in dialogue with her father.<\/p>\n

Cassandra Voss<\/a>, for whom the center is named, was my student. She was effervescent. Let me give an example. When I first met her in 2004, I was two years into being an assistant professor. In class I was talking about the film Iron Jawed Angels<\/i>, which is about Alice Paul and the suffragettes who secure the women\u2019s vote in 1920. In the film, Alice Paul is played with pluck and determination by Hilary Swank; she wears her hair in long braids on occasion. After class, a young woman, Cassadra Voss, ran up to me and said, \u201cLook, I wear my hair like Alice Paul. Ever since I saw the film, I love to wear my hair in braids like her.\u201d I thought who is this luminous, geeky creature in front of me who does feminist cosplay? I loved her from the start.<\/p>\n

Cassandra set out to be the first-ever major in Women\u2019s and Gender Studies<\/a> at our school. We started a minor in 2005 (notably late in higher ed), but she wouldn\u2019t settle for that. She was also determined to put on the first production of the Vagina Monologues<\/i>. And she insisted on hiring the first man in the Women\u2019s Center. So she wasn\u2019t so different from Alice Paul afterall. The thing that\u2019s harder to capture about her is that she was one of the most hopeful, ebullient people I\u2019ve met in my life. And that combination of bravery and delight was intoxicating. She was the kind of student who always bounded into my office and plopped on my couch. There was nothing small or half-hearted about her.<\/p>\n

You see I\u2019ve been in Women\u2019s Studies a long time. Since I was 19–the same age Cassandra was when she first took Introduction to Women\u2019s Studies. At her age, I was equally passionate about gender and social justice, but I was not nearly as loving. Early I had to manage so much anger about deep inequality and oppression; I didn\u2019t know what to do with it. Cassandra managed to keep believing in people and \u201ctheir better angels\u201d which often made me feel a bit sheepish in her presence. She recentered my politics in love. And one of the ways she did that was how she talked about her dad.<\/p>\n

\"Cassandra<\/a>
Cassandra Voss, St. Norbert College<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ll never forget when Cassandra said to me, \u201cMy dad is coming to hear our panel on The Women\u2019s Room<\/i> and he\u2019s conservative and I want you to meet him.\u201d I had taken Cassandra and a handful of students to present their work on that interesting, rarely taught early classic, The Women\u2019s Room<\/i> by Marilyn French. Now they were presenting it again at our undergraduate research day. I walked in the room and spotted him immediately. He had the starchiest shirt in the room. On a campus that is uber midwest-casual, Kurt Voss was pressed and tucked. And like his daughter, game for anything. Which is why the Fox-news watching, deeply religious CEO was in the front row taking notes about second-wave feminism. Some of Cassandra\u2019s friends snickered at his questions which were uninformed, understandably, and real. Real questions, ones they needed to answer to not cocoon themselves in their private ideologies. That day in the spring of 2006, I had no idea that a little over a year later, Kurt and I would begin a friendship after Cassandra\u2019s death that would last six years.<\/p>\n

Cassandra died unexpectedly in 2007. \u00a0Sometimes I still dream about her. Only now when I wake up, I go to work and see her face every day in the building her father built for her<\/a>. Some days I talk to her. Some days, I stare at the floor because I can\u2019t look at her face. It\u2019s just too much. I make my coffee and get to work. But there are moments, like her birthday coming up where I remember one of the three life-long goals she wrote on her then \u201cMyspace\u201d page in 2007: my goal is to make my dad a hard-core feminist.<\/p>\n

She got her wish.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned for how that dad built a multi-million dollar gender center.<\/a><\/p>\n

Follow us at: www.snc.edu\/cvc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/a>Facebook: https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/snc.cvc<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Cassandra<\/a>
Cassandra Voss Center,\u00a0 St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wisconsin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2013, I became the director of an unusual gender center. This is its story. September 18, 2014 My Girl w\/ Pen column is called \u201cGenderLab\u201d or watch what happens when you run one of the most unusual gender centers in the country. That sounds hyperbolic. I know because I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m living it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1971,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27659],"tags":[31073,245,31074,21387,1976,4374,99,31075,31076],"class_list":["post-7640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genderlab","tag-cassandra-voss-center","tag-feminism","tag-gender-center","tag-gender-studies","tag-masculinity","tag-parenting","tag-relationships","tag-st-norbert-college","tag-womens-center"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1971"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7640"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7650,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640\/revisions\/7650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}