Just a few reasons that I appreciate and support the participation of women in our discipline

This week's post is by SWIG member Steven Allison

As a dude working with a women’s group, I’ve considered the reasons for supporting women in Geography. Spending time and money for the benefit of others with no clear benefit for yourself is pretty much the foundation of volunteering, so it shouldn’t be so strange that a man would encourage women in this way. Yet, some might argue that drawing funding and resources away from myself and towards others is foolish in the hyper-competitive and poorly funded world of academia. Slashed budgets and full schedules mean university life can be a kind of archaic zero-sum game in which any resources directed towards others are, therefore, not going towards you. I obviously don’t agree, and there’s a laundry list of reasons for spending at least a little bit of my day working collaboratively with others, but for today I’m gonna go ahead and play this zero-sum game and look at how supporting women in Geography actually has some pretty direct benefits for me.

Anyone studying Geography at SDSU knows the program wouldn’t exist without one woman in particular, Alvena Storm. The university was originally a simple teacher training college, and when Alvena joined the department after graduating from Berkeley in 1926, Geography was not the kind of place to send young impressionable students into the desert or some distant mountain to get their boots muddy. The department certainly wouldn’t have paid for infusing the classroom with a little adventure. Not so for Alvena! Our own campus library is full of tales of wild, Depression-era field trips where students trapped rattlesnakes and honed their survival skills. By the time I arrived, muddy boots fieldwork was de rigueur for SDSU. Denied a PhD herself (cause she was a woman), she developed the SDSU Geography department and its relationship with her former UC campus into the doctoral-granting powerhouse it is today. That’s why the Geography building will retain the name “Storm Hall” even after the remodel is over.

This story is not intended to suggest that only I reap the benefits of elevating women to positions of power in my own little department. For example, many Geographers are critical of the turn-of-the- century theorist Ellen Semple because she promotes environmental determinism. However, among her less noted accomplishments is her profound contribution to making American Geography legitimate in the eyes of the international community. As one of the first and most prolific translators of Friedrich Ratzel (the godfather of Geography, I guess), she maintained a firm stance on the importance of theory in any investigation. Her insistence on theoretically informed research brought a new vigor and seriousness to the discipline, sparking sophisticated debates about the theories she advocated. The international recognition she received has a direct influence on my own ability as a man to conduct fieldwork in Asia- and this is one small example of her legacy.

No matter where I look, from the foundation of my own department to the broader debates that form the backbone of my discipline, I can see the very real ways powerful women in Geography make life better for men and women alike. So to respond to the idea that volunteering for a women’s organization does nothing for me, I can only say it is, in fact, an errant misunderstanding of our discipline. Viewing the intellectual field as a competitive, closed environment, only heightens my sense that advancing women in geography is sure to yield great returns for not just the field in general, but also myself on a personal and professrional level.

Learn more about Alvena Storm and Ellen Semple here:
http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/ellen-churchill-semple.html
http://library.sdsu.edu/scua/raising-our-voices/sdsu-history/faculty/alvena-storm