"With all the support and hard work, we did get to propose...a new concentration which was voted by the Faculty after quite a lot of debate and preparation," Suleiman says.

"At that point the committee was very wonderfully active and united, and we had been working for a good year preparing for this," she says.

In the early 1980s, there was quite a lot of opposition to the idea of a women's studies concentration, according to Suleiman.

"The ill-intentioned ones said this is all a bunch of political garbage and there is no intellectual value," said Suleiman. "The well-intentioned questions, I think, are real and were real at the time."

In particular, Suleiman mentions a concern that women's studies would become ghettoized.

In the final vote, however, only Mansfield was vehemently opposed to the institution of a degree-granting program.

The transcript of the meeting quotes Mansfield as saying "the appearance of this proposal on the Faculty floor marked a foolish and almost pitiful surrender to feminism."

Mansfield's objections to the proposal at the meeting were several, according to the transcript, although the government professor focused on particularly the reading list for Women's Studies 10, the proposed introductory course.

"To see bias, one had only to look at the reading list presented for the central course in this field of concentration, Women's Studies 10," reads the transcript of Mansfield's remarks. "In his 37 years at Harvard, Professor Mansfield had never seen a reading list more shameless and more pathetic than this one."

Stanley H. Hoffman, Dillon professor of the civilization of France, spoke in favor of the creation of the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies at the Faculty Council meeting in 1986.

"The breadth and many points of view that are represented will breed the debate, controversy and originality of a successful concentration," Hoffman said during the November 1986 meeting.

"I still would argue the same way I did 10 years ago," Hoffman says now.

Some faculty members expressed concern in 1986 that Harvard would have difficulty attracting top-notch professors in women's studies. But in recent years, the Faculty has pulled of such hiring coups as snagging renowned historian Ulrich, author of A Midwife's Tale, from the University of New Hampshire.

The 10th Anniversary

Suleiman says part of the theme of this year's events is the variety of outlooks in Women's Studies.