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Women, Education and Leadership

The Women, Education and Leadership at Rutgers Portal is a collection of interviews, videos and digital projects that document the history of women, education and leadership, as well as the complex institutionalization of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University. Rutgers, founded in 1766, educated men; women gained access to the university as students only in 1918 with the establishment of the New Jersey College for Women, now Douglass Residential College. Yet, from Rutgers inception women have played vital but invisible roles in the university.

The first phase of the Women, Educational and Leadership at Rutgers Portal consists of fourteen interviews with thirteen individuals. They were created by the award winning filmmaker June Cross for the documentary From the Boarding House to the Board Room: 250 Years of Women at Rutgers, which was produced by the Institute for Women’s Leadership Consortium, in celebration of Rutgers 250th Anniversary in 2016. The interviews with Rutgers faculty and alumnae, former deans of Douglass College, the dean of Douglass Residential College, and the director of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs record and chronicle first-hand accounts of the history of women at Rutgers and serve as a unique resource to advance research and learning on women, gender and leadership at Rutgers and beyond.