Introduction

Abstract

On an April afternoon in 1997, I nervously tugged at my blazer as I stood on the porch waiting for 83-year-old Dr. Emily Taylor to answer the door. My college housemother had arranged for us to meet, although I truly did not know what we had in common—this was before social media and the current ease of perusing someone’s biography. I had completed master’s work in American and women’s studies, but I did not know that Taylor once led the Office of Women in Higher Education (OWHE) at the American Council on Education (ACE), or what that meant. At that time, women’s studies rarely discussed the institutionalization of feminism in offices such as the OWHE. Nor did I understand what a dean of women was. The position had disappeared in the late 1970s after Title IX became law, well before I enrolled in college in 1989. Sixty years my senior, Taylor later confided that she met me only as a courtesy—but there we were in her living room in Lawrence, Kansas. She sat in a tall wingback chair by the fireplace, an imposing figure in a black dress, her left hand atop a silver-headed cane, her hair snow white. I felt small and unsure perched on the edge of a velvet settee. We began with pleasantries and I hesitatingly asked what it was like to be dean of women at the University of Kansas (KU).