ODU Remembers Carolyn Rhodes as a Pioneer and an Inspiration
Carolyn Rhodes
By David Simpson
Carolyn Rhodes never expected to shake up the campus.
When she arrived at Old Dominion in 1965 as assistant professor of English, she was a 40-year-old widow with two children. She was just glad to have landed a job teaching literature and conducting research at a school near the ocean.
True, she was already open-minded on social issues, having joined a sit-in at a Woolworth's counter in Lexington, Ky., to push for racial desegregation.
But it was at ODU that she became a feminist, and an active one: She lobbied for equal pay and opportunity for female faculty, co-founded the University Women's Caucus in 1974, and helped launch the Women's Studies program in 1978 and the Friends of Women's Studies eight years later.
Rhodes, a professor emerita of English and Women's Studies, died March 24, 2019, at age 93.
ODU colleagues, proteges and former students remember her as a pioneer and an inspiration.
"Women were responsive to Carolyn, and some men were uncomfortable," said Karen Vaughan, head of the Scholarly Communication & Publishing Department for Old Dominion University Libraries. "My favorite quote of hers: 'I'm not a radical. All I want is equality.'"
Vaughan said Rhodes believed that the history of women's programs at ODU ought to be preserved.
"She kept everything," Vaughan said, "and adorned reports, articles and letters with many of her handwritten sticky notes ...."
Rhodes' papers are now part of the University Archives. In 2009, she sat for a series of interviews with Vaughan that resulted in an online oral history.
Janet Bing, a University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of English who specializes in linguistics, considered Rhodes a mentor and friend.
"I was a feminist before I came to ODU, but I had never considered teaching a women's studies course until Carolyn put a copy of Suzette Hayden Elgin's book Native Tongue in my mailbox. This is a science fiction novel about language and linguistics, and it convinced me that I could develop a Women's Studies course in my field. I titled the course "Language, Gender, and Power," and I loved teaching it for many years."
Ruth Triplett, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, was an ODU undergraduate when she met Rhodes in the early 1980s. Triplett quickly got involved in the Women's Studies program. At that point she was not aware of Rhodes' efforts on behalf of women's rights and opportunities.
"All I knew," Triplett said, "was how she made me feel in the classroom — empowered and proud to be a woman — and that feeling lingers with me today.
"I did not know enough to understand it then, but the reason was ODU felt safe, welcoming and had an open learning environment. Those feelings came about because of the work that Carolyn Rhodes, and her many colleagues on campus, did to create an environment open to all."
Rhodes was born Carolyn Hodgson in 1925 in Birmingham, Ala. She earned bachelor's degrees in psychology and English from the University of Alabama and a master's in psychology from Columbia University. After her first husband's death, Rhodes earned both a master's and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. In 1969 she married ODU English Professor Ernest Rhodes, who died in 2015.
Carolyn Rhodes reflected on her life, including her attraction to feminism, in the 2009 oral history.
"I don't recall any meaningful consciousness-raising until I came to Old Dominion College in 1965," she said. "Then I began gradually to develop a feminist consciousness."
As a member of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Rhodes joined the organization's women's caucus. Meeting people who espoused feminism excited her. She brought that excitement back to campus and rallied support for a women's caucus here.
It was the early '70s, and social change was in the air. But Rhodes had also gotten a first-hand taste of the inequities female faculty faced in pay and promotions.
In her 2009 interview she recalled complaining to her dean that the contract of a female instructor had not been renewed, while a less worthy male instructor had been kept on. The dean's response: The man had a wife and child to support.
"And I was not at that time even wise, or wily, or adept enough to say, for all you know she had a mother and who knows what else," Rhodes said. "And that's not the point. That's not why you hire and fire.
"But we had no data. And without data we couldn't prove the kind of suspicions we had about unfairness based on gender. Salaries were totally secret; perks like release time for research went to upper ranks, and few of us could get into the upper ranks."
Then came a three-year battle, from 1974 to '77, for that information between the fledgling Women's Caucus and the University. The data eventually would confirm the women's suspicions and allow them to demand an open and equitable system for pay and promotions.
In the meantime, the Women's Caucus was off and running, bringing in feminist speakers, putting out a newsletter, and lobbying colleagues — male and female — to support the cause.
Caucus members also took the lead in seeking to establish a Women's Studies program at ODU, but they faced a great obstacle.
"Funding really seemed to be out of the question, no matter how ardent we caucus members were, and we were the main instigators," Rhodes recalled in 2009. "Most of the decision makers were indifferent and many opposed."
The solution was to seek a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund a pilot year. Once the University was persuaded to sign off on the idea, Rhodes and other leaders of the effort set up a proposal development group that would choose courses to be offered. Consultants ran workshops to increase teachers' knowledge of feminist resources.
Rhodes was tapped to write the NEH Pilot Grant in Women's Studies. She spent the summer of 1976 putting the proposal together and shipped it off in the fall.
"For the next eight months, we waited to hear their decision," she remembered. "We tried not to brood over it or hope too much. In April of 1977, really wonder of wonders, NEH sent us news that they would fund our trial year."
NEH committed $42,000, ODU supplemented that amount with nearly $13,000 and classes began to meet in the fall.
Four of the six Women's Studies courses during the pilot year were team taught: Two or three teachers, each from a different discipline, would come together in one classroom.
"One interesting point I noticed was that when teachers differed in opinions or values, we learned that students enjoy such intellectual debate," Rhodes recalled. "And many would remember both sides, both standpoints, better than if one teacher presented them singly."
Before the end of the fall semester, the dean announced he would continue the program beyond the pilot year. After a national search, the scholar Nancy Bazin was hired to run it.
"Nancy's achievements exceeded all of our hopes," Rhodes said. "She expanded the program. Numbers of students grew. And she established certificates for both undergraduates and graduate students. She continued to publish, especially articles on prominent women writers."
But when Bazin left in 1985 to become chair of the English department, President Joseph M. Marchello decided to replace her with a series of Women's Studies faculty temporarily on loan from other departments.
That strategy didn't go over well with Rhodes and other campus feminists, who wanted a national search for a full-time administrator.
When Rhodes vented her frustration in class, one of her students, former Virginia Del. Edythe Harrison, took note and determined to keep the program from being undercut.
Harrison, Rhodes, and Ellen Morris, the president of the Women's Caucus, recruited people to join the campaign. A special committee suggested forming a Friends of Women's Studies group to provide community support to Women's Studies. It turned out that many local women wanted to help. By the end of the drive, the group had 150 dues-paying members.
In the meantime, President Marchello had gotten wind of the campaign, Rhodes said.
"Before long, he instructed our dean to establish a search committee to find a full-time, well-qualified director for the Women's Studies program at ODU," she said.
A crisis was averted. Rhodes and company had notched yet another victory in the march to equality.
Feminism shaped her scholarship, too.
She specialized in women writers and American feminism, plus American fiction, utopian literature, and science fiction. She edited the 1980 reference book First Person Female American: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography of the Autobiographies of American Women Living After 1950. Her articles included a number about such women authors as Tillie Olsen and Gail Godwin.
At her retirement in 1990, a University tribute read in part: "Dr. Rhodes has had a long commitment to effective teaching and intimate involvement with the Women's Studies programs. She is respected by her colleagues and students for her contribution to this field and as a thorough teacher."
A remark she made for the oral history about the founding of the Women's Studies program — now a department — could stand as a statement of her own legacy:
"In the decades since 1978, we all — all the starters, all the founders — have been marvelously rewarded as we watch later students and newly arriving faculty seize our vision and expand it, and they fulfill their own new dreams."
