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| navigate: home: magazine: winter 2000: article | |
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Conference maps the history of gender in the landscape By Celena E. Kusch | |||||||
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Sociologist Dr. James Loewen likes to tell the story of how each summer his parents loaded sleeping bags, sandwiches, maps and children into the car for a road trip through historic America, seeing the sites marked on the map and learning history through the monuments and markers along the road. As he speaks, his listeners laugh and nod with recognition of similar experiences of their own. In fact, Loewen argues, this experience is widespread, and many Americans learn more about their history from the landscapes in which they travel and live than they do from history books. The question is what kind of history does the landscape tell? Last summer at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, the conference Gendered Landscapes: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Past Place and Space attempted to answer that and many other questions about the history and heritage of the built and natural landscapes that shape our contemporary environment. Loewen, author of the best-selling book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Teacher Got Wrong, was among four plenary speakers and more than 120 presenters who shared their research at the conference. These scholars convened to take a closer look at the ways certain cultures in different times and places have created built environments that reflect the gendered relationship between men and women and have used representations of the built environment through words, images, photographs and maps to reflect, reinforce and even change the values of our social and political institutions. According to the Penn State conference co-chairs, Bonj Szczygiel, assistant professor of landscape architecture and associate director of the Center for Studies in Landscape History; Josephine Carubia, coordinator of Student Programs and Service Learning for The Schreyer Honors College and affiliate assistant professor of English; and Lorraine Dowler, assistant professor of geography, both the interdisciplinary scope and the attention to gender will make a significant contribution to the way we understand the broader field of landscape history. “The word ‘gender’ implies a social framework for understanding past perceptions of appropriate roles and relationships for both sexes—a dense weave of social commentary that extends into the landscape, ” Carubia explained. “By understanding the role of gender in landscape history we not only bring about visibility of a traditionally ignored segment of society but also advance a fuller, and more honest, construct of the past. ” In his talk titled “Must a Hero Be a He? How Historic Markers and Monuments Treat Women, Men and Gender,” Loewen pointed out that every monument tells two stories—the history it records and the history of the time and place in which it was erected. All too often, he argued, the second story is one of racism, sensationalism and a neglect of the accomplishments of women. He cited a monument to pioneer victims of a Native American attack that never happened and a historic marker recording the lynching of an Hispanic woman as examples of the way the landscape writes a common history that Americans should be more reluctant to accept. “These issues are commonly ignored in traditional landscape studies,“ Szczygiel said. “The Gendered Landscapes conference begins to fill in a significant gap in scholarship by creating a space for interdisciplinary discussion and idea development. This has been a unique educational opportunity for faculty and students alike. We are very excited to be providing the forum for scholars to question the vocabularies and metaphors that shape our assumptions about the landscape.” This interdisciplinary focus of the conference is reflected throughout the conference. In addition to Loewen, plenary speakers included scholars of geography, urban planning and literature. Dr. James Duncan, a geographer at Cambridge University, discussed his research into the historical documents and letters of the British men who settled in colonial Ceylon. He found that the record of their struggle against nature in the tropics imitates the exotic landscapes of boys’ adventure novels and serves as a sign of masculinity and heroic self-sacrifice in the cause of progress. Dr. Daphne Spain, professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia, shared her current research on the impact of large, national women’s voluntary organizations on city planning, improvement and development. Her talk, titled “How Women Saved the City: American Urban Landscapes at the Turn of the Century,” explored the often hidden achievements of Victorian women in establishing water purification systems, cycle paths and street cleaning within cities. Penn State’s Dr. Susan K. Harris, professor of English and graduate director of the English Department, presented a talk on “19th-Century American Gendered Landscapes,” in which she traced the ways 19th-century men and women privately responded to changing public expectations of gender roles. She further emphasized the differences between those roles and the practice of gender in everyday life. The conference was an outreach program of the College of Arts and Architecture and the College of the Liberal Arts, but it received broad interdisciplinary support. Co-sponsors included the Center for Studies in Landscape History, the Glenda Laws Memorial Fund from the Department of Geography and the Women’s Studies Program. Additional support came from the Outreach and Cooperative Extension Program Innovation Fund and the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. “The impetus for the conference came from the Center for Studies in Landscape History, but it would not have been possible without support from the other areas,” Szczygiel noted. “Never before in the history of this campus have these academic units come together to plan for such an event. The interdisciplinary character alone suggests a milestone for intellectual discourse and dissemination of ideas, and the conference far exceeded our expectations in terms of numbers and content as well. Based on the feedback we received from our participants, we are confident that this conference will provide a model for interdisciplinary exchange which will be emulated at Penn State and beyond.” The conference drew more than 125 scholars and professionals from more than 80 institutions worldwide, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Norway, France, Belgium, Australia and Taiwan. Participants represented a variety of different disciplines: agrarian studies, American studies, anthropology, architectural history, art, communication studies, English, environmental studies, gender studies, geography, history, landscape architecture, rural research, sociology, urban planning and policy development, women's studies and more. “This type of interdisciplinary dialogue is a rare opportunity and a critical component for the continued growth and development of discipline-based knowledge—a purpose that lies at the heart of every great learning institution,” Carubia said. Conference participants have already noticed the benefits of this interdisciplinary exchange. An assistant professor of design from the University of Iowa hadn’t realized that her work had gender implications until she read the conference description, which sparked a light of identification and allowed her to form new research alliances she had never considered before. “Given the unique potential to promote professional development through the dissemination of interdisciplinary scholarly work and the national attention resulting from the alliance with the Center for Studies in Landscape History and the Women’s Studies Program, the conference was a groundbreaking event,” Szczygiel said. “In a very significant way, it has established the University as a leading institution in this interdisciplinary field. “Many of our participants are at the cutting edge of their fields, looking at places where disciplines overlap, ” she continued.“ Often this has limited their ability to exchange ideas within the conventions of their own fields. Some scholars have suggested that the future of education, and knowledge, will come from this type of broadened discussion. Many believe that academicians have become experts of minute foci and that now is the time to pull back and observe the more holistic picture.” “The reason the conference was so exciting to me,” Dowler said, “is that although there is a considerable amount of work being conducted in geography that focuses on the intersection of gender, place and space, there is very little research examining how gendered identities are inscribed in the landscape. The conference opened a forum of discussion for me which I don’t find at other conferences which focus on feminist studies or geography.” Dr. Sally Schaumann, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, agreed. In the past, she has often been forced to fit into more general conferences about space where landscape is not a central concern. She was enthusiastic in her support for the conference’s goals. “With the combination of a broad field and a focused theme, the scholars who participated in Gendered Landscapes have really embraced this conference as centering on their research interests,” Carubia added. In keeping with the theme, conference participants embarked on a guided bus tour of the historic landscapes surrounding State College. Sam Dennis, Penn State graduate student in the Department of Geography, was one of the tour’s co-facilitators. According to Dennis, the tour passed from the football fields and developments surrounding Penn State onto the farmland Johays Vista. A local farmer provided insight into the complexities of a contemporary Amish community living in a landscape rooted in the 19th century. Dowler presented research about women in Amish communities, including their extremely progressive ideas for coping with depression and isolation. The trip had unexpected results as well. “There were many international scholars on the field trip,” Dennis explained, “so our discussions strayed into some American history as well. The different perspectives on the landscapes we were exploring really made it a great trip that added to the associations of Penn State as a productive place for studying landscape architecture and women’s studies.” Beyond its implications for partnership and future outreach in this field, the conference will lead to two publications: selected conference proceedings to be published by Penn State’s Center for Studies in Landscape History and an edited volume on selected themes from the conference to be published by a university or commercial academic press. In her address, Harris praised the conference for being so cross-disciplinary and suggested possible outcomes of this collaborative exchange in a field which at present lacks a systematic genealogy and methodology for tracing its development throughout history. “Imagine an interdisciplinary examination of historical systems of class, gender, race and landscape,” Harris said. “This conference is an ideal location for organizing a project and methodology that can embrace the whole picture of gender—through landscape architecture, geography, art, literature and history—across space and time.” An outreach program of the College of Arts and Architecture and the College of the Liberal Arts | ||||||
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