Interview with Karen Jolna

By Brooke Soderbery

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Brooke Soderbery: First, I wanted to ask if you could tell us a little bit about your background and what pushed you towards the feminist movement.

 

Karon Jolna: I'm actually Canadian born. I grew up in Toronto, and I always considered myself a feminist, but I didn't really find that aha moment or find feminism itself until college. I went to the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and this was the late 80s. My first two years of college, there was no women's studies. I didn't even know about it. I was in political science, but I was always very interested in politics, leadership, and women's leadership. Then they started women's studies at my university. So I took my first class and that was it, I just loved it. It really was, I know Ms. [Magazine] calls it the aha moment, but it really was for me, it explained a lot of what I was thinking, but didn't know how to articulate: my experience at college and all sorts of experiences beyond college with harassment or relationship things that were, where you start to say, “This is not right.” You start to know how to put it together. 

 

It really helped me explain the things that I was experiencing, and also got me so interested in women's studies itself. I ended up having a double major and honors women's studies and political science. They didn't have a master’s yet in women's studies at my school, but they were just starting, and I loved feminist theory in particular. I was doing political theory and feminist theory, and then they had just started the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism, and it was a master's at the University of Western, and so it was the same women's studies professors who were teaching in that, so I had never even thought about graduate school until I was in women's studies. I especially liked in undergrad, I had always been a straight A student, but my first couple of years of college, I hadn't quite found myself. And what women's studies especially gave me was, when you're totally interested in something that's what pulls you in, but it was the ability to do critical reading across my courses. I sort of found my way of reading texts and reading in all of my political science courses. So it wasn't just in women's studies, and I was able to apply it, and just be very successful at school through it. It really gave me the platform to succeed in school, and the drive to go on to graduate school. So I did a Masters of Theory Criticism. Then while I was there, I loved that, and wanted to go on to a PhD. At the time, so this is early 1990s, there were two PhDs in Women's Studies in Canada, and that was at York University and the University of Toronto, and that was just through education. Then other colleagues in my program started to apply to the United States. 

 

And there were, at that time, only two PhD programs, and that was Emory University and Clark University which I don't think has a program anymore. So anyway, Emory ended up being the first [Women's Studies] PhD program in the United States, and that just spurred me into not just graduate school and my own research, but just being part of the field of women's studies, just really having a sense of wanting to promote the field and be part of the larger advocacy of doing this kind of research and teaching. So that took me to Emory and my Women's Studies PhD. So I'll stop there. If you have some more questions, I can talk about how I got from there to Ms. 

 

Soderbery: How did you go from this PhD program to Ms.?
 

Jolna: I was in that first cohort of Women's Studies PhDs at Emory and an international student. We also had some of the best professors there, like I just seemed to luck out at each stage. So Beverely Guy-Sheftal, who's at Spelman, was teaching the first feminist theory course, which I said, I'm very interested in. And she also did the first like intervention, how feminist theory was taught, and so the core feminist theory course was black feminist theory, which is really cool. So at the time, this was 90s feminist theory and women's studies was being taught in a very different way, like we were really in the vanguard at that time of doing intersectionality from the start, starting with black feminist theory. It was a wonderful experience. 

 

And as it turns out, many of my colleagues on the Ms. Committee of Scholars are from the Emory PhD program. So the two co-chairs of the Ms. Committee of Scholars are Carrie Baker at Smith College, and so she was at Emory and did Women's Studies and Law, and Janelle Hobson, who's at University of Albany, she was there as well. And so it's just so wonderful how this cohort has stayed together and grown up together. At the recent NWSA conference, it was the three of us leading the Ms. Scholars, so it's just this wonderful community. So you really start being a part of a community as well, and that, to me, is the most important part. And I remember going to the NWSA, that's the National Women's Studies Association conference, for the first time when I was a graduate student, and I was just looking for one person I might have known. And now I just got back from the National Women's Studies conference in Detroit, and it’s just like a reunion. Just walking through there and knowing everyone, and it's just alive. Every single person I would be able to find something I'm interested in, what they're working on, or ways we could work together, or they're interested in Ms. So I just feel very connected and part of this community, and now with my colleagues, we're sort of becoming the leaders, this next generation of leaders in women's studies. I'm just thrilled about that and thrilled how it was the three of us up there at once, so it's not one person's. It's really the way I've noticed we lead just organically,, in the way that we apply our feminist pedagogy to panels, to our professional experience, and our writing. 

 

That's a little bit about that, but how I got from Emory to here is that I graduated and was moving to Los Angeles. So I ended up getting married to my partner I met in Atlanta and becoming a US citizen and moving to the west coast for their job, and just cold calling. So that's another thing I've learned. When you're part of the women's studies community, you can arrive at a city and call the office, and they're there in the same way that if someone calls me, anyone calls me, I'm here if they're interested in internship, if they're interested in writing a piece, we're here for them to respond to them and do our best to support the work. So when I called the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Regina Lark, who was then the head of the Center, happened to answer the phone. She said she didn't usually answer the phone. I said, “Hi, I'm here, and I just got my PhD.” She's like, “We haven't seen a Women's Studies PhD here yet. You've got to come down.”

 

So she immediately invited me on to the UCLA independent research scholars. So I had a home just immediately, and this was a group of independent scholars, and that has served us, and I'm still in touch with all those folks who also, then you start working with them at Ms. and you know.  But UCLA is very close to the Ms. magazine offices as well, so I was teaching as an adjunct, those were my first opportunities, and my area specialty is women's leadership. So I had the great opportunity to create my own course.and I love interviewing people from all across politics, business, law. So this course was part interview, part mentor, and that led me to meeting a lot of the women leaders in LA, and one of those was Kathy Spiller, who's the executive director at the Feminist Majority foundation. So I actually, just through mutual contacts, met Kathy and invited her to speak at my class. And then she invited me to come over to Ms., and they were just starting the Ms. Classroom program at the time to advise on it. This was during 2008-2009 when the recession was starting. UCLA was just announcing that, not only would they not have new lines, it just became a department in 2008, so a lot of folks were looking, would there be opportunity, you know, full time opportunities in a newly formed Women's Studies Department, and at that point even our adjunct positions weren't secure. It was just the timing. Some things work out in strange ways. My advice is always to say yes to an opportunity. If someone asks you to speak at an event or attend something, I always find that my yesses have taken me to the next place where I want to be, or where I love, and my journey. So then I arrived here at Ms. and still taught part time and stayed affiliated with the research scholars until the program, unfortunately just ended two years ago, which was really disappointing, but was able to bring you my network as part of Ms. as well. And so then Ms. Classroom became my thing, my baby,

 

Soderbery: I was wondering if you could expand a bit on your role in Ms. classroom and what you do there.

 

Jolna: Sure. So I came in as someone uniquely positioned with a Women's Studies PhD to be able to talk to other faculty about the value Ms. would bring to using it in the classroom. It had always been used in classrooms, as you know, photocopies and stuff like that, but for the first time, we're creating a digital library where faculty could actually put it on their syllabus, and it was online, so it was like also following the trajectory of online teaching and meeting those needs. I started with advising on how it might be used in the classroom, what kind of additional resources, and then just reaching out to faculty at conferences, at workshops we put together, and engaging them in both writing for Ms. and then the same scholars who write for Ms., a lot of them are women's studies scholars, so it became even more of a good fit in the classroom. So I'd say half, or more than half, are scholar writers now versus journalists. I think the earlier versions of MS would be more journalist focused, and then would be used in the class. Although there's been, Ms. has always grown up, though, along with women's studies, and had a Ms. Committee of Scholars. So that was something that I knew was the sort of foundation of the work we were doing. We've really built out the Ms. Committee of Scholars, and that's been crucial to Ms. growing, our writers, and being used in the classroom. 

 

Soderbery: This is a little bit of a pivot, but I was wondering if you could share why you think it's important for students to study women's history, women's studies in like the K-12 classroom. And also, if you're teaching women's studies in Higher Ed, as you mentioned, have those experiences informed said opinions?

 

Jolna: Well, the earlier, the better. That's why we have the Girls Learn International program, and my biggest goal for Ms. Classroom (I've been talking to Miss Ileana Jimenez for years, who leads Teaching Women's Studies in High School) is to get Ms. in high schools. Actually, now we have an opportunity to do that. One of the biggest accomplishments we've had with Ms. Classroom recently is that we have a partnership now with ProQuest to digitize the entire archive of MS from 1972 to present day. We're going to be launching next year, and that will be available in both high school libraries and college libraries. That is on my list, and that's why I'd love to talk to your teachers. Beyond this, that's definitely going to be a new initiative where I'd like to build out a team of teachers to start to introduce Ms. as soon as it's available, and start to work on high school level resources. So there are definitely different ways of teaching at the high school level and at the college level, and my expertise is at the college level, so I would need to definitely bring in advisors from high schools. Getting an AP in women's studies would be wonderful, but I'm not sure that the country is going in that direction right now. 

 

But I think it's so important, especially now, the history of the women's movement. Think about Roe, overturning Roe, the American History Association put out a statement that was based on bad history. So we need good history out there. We need history that's inclusive, it tells the whole story, and women's history in particular I just love myself. Through Ms., I have become sort of, partly, have the historian brain now because using the archive, I've worked on readers and other things where I do use the archived articles. We're the only ones who have it right now in the hard copy form. So that literally is a historical record of the women's movement, and that's why I'm so excited about having the archive, because this is going to contribute to teaching women's history and especially what Ms. brings to a classroom which is getting students engaged. When we do Ms. writer’s workshops, we train scholars to write for a popular audience. It's engaged. It's written in a totally different way, so it brings you in. We give them tips which are different from research writing, where researchers finish an article and say this is a topic for further research, we complete almost every article like this sort of narrative ends with solutions and actions. So even if you're studying a historical piece, when you're using Ms., you can follow that whole issue through from 1972 to where it is today. And unfortunately, we have many of the same issues, and in fact, are even backsliding on the issues. 

 

So you can see, first of all, you can see the history of how we fought and use that. We're not, even with the overturning of Roe, we're not going back to the beginning, because we have this whole history, including with the MS archive, to draw from. Even Feminist Majority, in particular, we've written a lot on their work with reproductive justice. So we've got the blueprint for how you fight, and how we accomplished all this. You've got the history there to harness for fighting and moving feminism forward right now, where it's one of the hardest times, and we're looking to the next generation. It's so important. That's also why Ms. Classroom is so important to Ms. It really is the only way we can connect to the next generation of feminists and bring all these valuables, the leaders, the lessons, the experiences, the historical record, and bring that to your generation.

 

Soderbery: You've kind of already answered my next question, but in case you want to say anything else, or have anything else to add: Do you support the creation of an AP United States Women’s History course, and can you tell me why you think that course should exist?

 

Jolna: Well, one, you also want to meet student needs. And I can tell you at the university level, women's studies is one of the most popular courses, even if we’re getting pushback in some places, so it certainly meets the needs and interests of women and men. We're starting to have more conversations about young men as well, educating young men in different versions and different narratives about masculinity, and bringing men into feminism as well. We're going to change the name of Girls Learn International because it's so important to include as many students as possible. Because I think it's important for every student. So that's the other thing, it is important for everyone. And there are so many ways you can make the case for it. One of the first things I worked on was a special issue on women's studies for Ms. Magazine where we essentially made the case for women's studies in the college classroom, and then faculty who are starting Women's Studies departments. It was like a whole collection of how many programs there are. So some data, some examples, some all that. They've used that in a lot of programs, like you always have to come with your business case of why this is important and that it's been done, and examples of how it's been done and being done. 

 

The interest and the popularity and then the importance of just this knowledge for young people, and I think you could certainly make the case that you know for young men and young women, is critical in their education. I'm happy to like, we have someone like Ileana Jimenez, who would be able to supply, and that's why you need a movement behind you when you're proposing something like the AP history, because that movement is gathering together the community of the people who are teaching it. Because you need to show examples of the curriculum and the success and the interest. That movement, which you're all a part of, which is wonderful. So I think, you're there, and then bringing the people you need to into that community, growing the community, and then getting it out wherever you can, and reaching out to Ms. Magazine, like I was saying, with or without the Ms. archive, we're interested in supporting women's studies in high schools, and so are a lot of other organizations. So sometimes it's just doing the work. 

 

And like I was saying, you can cold call, that this is just a different kind of community where you could do this kind of thing, and as a student. So we discovered that with the advent of email. So I was pre-email and email, and then email gave you the opportunity not just to email your own professors, but when I was in grad school, we started emailing the professors who were writing the books we were reading. I couldn't believe that they would write us back, and then they would do interviews. And in fact, that's how I started interviewing people, and knew that I could reach out to leaders, and the leaders would respond, because for the most part, feminists and women leaders want to give back. So it's like it, we've got it. We've got the infrastructure there. So I totally think that it's entirely possible to do this. And another org that we've worked closely with in terms of high schools is the African American policy forum, Kimberly Crenshaw, and so they're also here in Los Angeles, but they've been, because of the critique of critical race theory, they were put on the defensive, but now they've become really strong advocates for teaching black history, teaching women's history, bringing intersectionality to your classroom. So you've got the folks to reach out to now and I really do think and believe in that we need the partnership between college women's studies and high school women's studies and women's history and all that, because the we’ve done it in colleges, and can advise on all the curriculum and business case to get it in there. 

 

And then you know, through the partnership the teachers let us know exactly you know, what the students need, what what they’re interested in, I'd be interested, in fact, of what interests you most about women, women's studies in high school, what would you like to see in a women's history course? Why would you find it important to you and your academic journey?

 

Soderbery: Yeah. I think it interests me both because it's kind of empowering. I've written some student testimonials about this, just to read all of this and see, okay, oh, I’m here and represented in history. I'm not really speaking as someone who's never had the opportunity to learn about women's history. Because, I mean, Ms. Williams and Ms. Kelly, you've been my history teachers in high school, and you've always included women in the curriculum. So as someone who's kind of had it, it’s both, I think, just interesting, for the sake of, like, these stories are very captivating. Even just doing these oral interviews, I've heard all these interesting people's stories, and they just haven't been told. So it's a sense that, people, I just think people should be talking about them more, because they're so powerful, so intriguing to students. Very intriguing to me. I've written some biographies, and it's crazy. You can Google some of these people, nothing pops up, and then you kind of haunt online archives, and all these amazing things come out about them. You just go: people should be talking about them. I know my peers would be interested in talking about these people. One of the figures that interested my peers the most in our APUSH class was Carrie Nation. We should have a wider opportunity to discuss all these figures that kind of get skimmed over just because there isn't enough time to teach about everybody that's ever existed in American history in like one year?

 

Jolna: What I found also with my women in leadership course at UCLA, I didn't want, I would love to have, of course, Gloria Steinem, or, like the very top, like the Hillary Clinton, whoever would be the the leaders that you know of, I found that it was more value, valuable to the students, to get the leaders who were really doing the work, not the ones who are the iconic leaders. And those are sort of like the books are written about them. And so it was, I think it's more eye opening and instructive to talk to the real life leaders who are, who are doing the work, and they're often not, they're, they're in all sorts of positions. So when I say leader, that doesn't mean I'm looking to the very top of an organization, but leading in whatever your work is. I find that fascinating, and it's more practical. When you listen to a story, say, a formal interview with you know, a well known leader, it's the same story, and they've told their story over and over again, but it's so interesting to hear the, it's the details that really come out when you hear someone talk about their own story, and I think you can identify more with with that those kind of stories, then the big, you know, the iconic leaders of feminine, even though Gloria Steinem, obviously I love, and I'm thrilled I've gotten to meet her through my work, and she is as wonderful as they say.

 

Soderbery: I fully agree. I was just doing some research into some of the women that worked under and were appointed during the Ford Administration to possibly interview them, and just doing that, my teach Ms. Williams and I, we looked at this women’s wikipedia page that we both had never heard of before and she helped close NAFTA. And we were like how is this person not in discussion? There’s people who deserve to be talked about at the highschool level and it’s both empowering and interesting for both women and men to learn about.

 

Those are all my questions. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed!