In 1995, President Bill Clinton brought his daughter Chelsea to GW for a night of basketball.
The men’s team played first. After they clinched a victory, President Clinton stood up to leave just as the women’s team was about to take the court.
Bonnie J. Morris, a GW adjunct women’s studies professor, spotted Clinton and walked up to him.
As she recounted in her book last year, Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor, she asked him to stick around for the women's game.
“It would mean so much to us, to our women’s team, if you would stay and watch the women play. Don’t leave now. Show your daughter and the world that you support Title IX and women’s sports!” Dr. Morris told the president.
Dr. Morris got her wish. The president ended up staying to watch the women’s team win.
Experiences like this helped inspire Dr. Morris to write her one-woman play Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor, which she turned into a book of the same name. The book has been selected as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award -- an award that honors lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literature. Dr. Morris’ book is a contender in the drama category.
“My book talks extensively about how the fear of being labeled a lesbian keeps some terrific young women from taking a women’s studies class,” says Dr. Morris, who came to GW in 1994.
Dr. Morris’ book includes stories of many of her GW students as well as experiences in her classroom.
“Individuals who have never taken a class before expect to face a room full of ardent and mouthy feminists and are especially horrified when they learn that there is a possibility of flunking women’s studies, and that it’s not the easy A they had hoped it to be,” she says.
Throughout her many years of teaching, Dr. Morris has had female students say they weren’t able to take her course because their fathers wouldn’t pay the tuition or their boyfriends broke up with them because they were enrolled in the course.
When it comes to women’s studies, Dr. Morris says she’s heard it all: it’s useless, too political and not scholarly.
“I decided to create a humorous presentation about women’s studies because I thought it would be good to show that these fears are ridiculous,” she says. “You have to become a diplomat for women’s studies.”
Before coming to GW, Dr. Morris interviewed for a teaching position at a university in the Midwest. While the dean wanted her to teach a women’s studies class, he asked her to take out the word “women” from the course name because it might effect the enrollment of men.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Dr. Morris. “Would you ask a professor of Chinese history to take the word Chinese out?”
Dr. Morris says GW, which began offering women’s studies courses in the early 70s, has one of the oldest women’s studies graduate programs in the country. Her Athletics and Gender course fills up every semester. After graduating, her students go to law school, work in international development and work for organizations that help women in crisis.
The Lambda Literary Awards will be given out on May 27 at the School of Visual Arts Theater in New York.