Kathi George online interview, conducted by Elizabeth Silvas (transcript)

George recalls in detail the process of producing the magazine, including all editing and proofing passes and the practicalities of printing, getting subscribers, maintaining the mailing list, and more. Transcript (43 pages) of interview by Elizabeth Silvas with Kathi George, recorded March 1, 2021.

Kathi George, Recorded zoom interview, March 1, 2021, 10:00 am MST Interviewer: Elizabeth Silva TRANSCRIPT Keywords Labor intensive Editorial process Printing process Mailing process Individual subscribers Summary: In 1974, Kathi and her colleagues founded a Women’s Studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The same group of women branched out and formed Frontiers, based on their own experiences and desires. The Journal was founded in the fall of 1974 and the first issue was published in 1975. These five founding collective members produced the Journal in a nonhierarchical labor structure. All five members were capable of doing all the jobs that the Journal required, although this model was not sustainable in the long run. For thirteen years, Kathi was the main editor and publisher, although the editorial collective was active for the majority of the time. The editorial collective members came together for monthly meetings where they read manuscripts, set up policy, solicited board members, and shared meals. Kathi took on the labors of the Journal, which amounted to over forty hours a week, unpaid. The process of collecting manuscripts, reviewing, editing, publishing, distributing, and mailing the Journal took an extraordinary amount of work. Although Frontiers was under Women’s Studies, it was unincorporated and therefore did not technically have an institutional home or legal status. Kathi also was the publisher for the Journal. For many years Kathi would drive the Journal out to local bookstores, and found it interesting that people weren’t purchasing the Journal to read for pleasure – and thus it became clear that Frontiers was in fact a more academic journal than its original design. Although the original editorial collective was made up of middle-class, highly educated white women, Kathi asserts that there was a big commitment to women of color, lesbians, working-class women, and nonelite white women from day one. Toward the end of Kathi’s tenure, there was in-fighting and Kathi determined that the model of one unpaid person doing the majority of the work was unsustainable. 1 Kathi George Interviewer: Oh, good morning, Kathi. Thank you so much for your willingness to participate in our oral histories. We’re just going to go ahead and get started with the first question. Kathi, there’s a lot of context about who you are in some of the written history of Frontiers. Do you want to just go ahead and start with letting us know how you got involved with the Journal? Kathi: Yes. In 1974, we founded a Women’s Studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder and some of the women who were in that founding committee for the program also branched out and decided to start a journal. There weren’t very many women’s studies journals at all in the country at that time, 1974, but we founded a committee and proceeded to pull together a new journal out of our own experience and our desires. And so we started in about summer or early fall of 1974 and published our first issue in 1975. So, I was one of the original founding committee members which then flowed into being an editorial collective and, at first, the original five members, 1 the core group, we did almost everything. There were no hierarchies so we all were capable of doing all of the jobs. That didn’t last long. Soon it evolved into board members doing most of the manuscript reading and coming to meetings. But I was doing a lot of almost all the editorial office work and all the business office work and all the subscription work. So let me start with what the editorial board collective members were supposed to do. We really wanted to be a collective rather than a hierarchical board and each one of us was equal to the other. No one was more important and each of us had one equal vote. The editorial collective members were to read manuscripts and comment, come to meetings, which were held about once a month, edit some of the manuscripts, come to potluck dinners and weekend retreats, set policy, 2 decide theme issues, solicit manuscripts, solicit new board members, and decide on the budget. Then soon after that, as time went by and as things evolved, I’ve come up with…these are all the different things that I did as a three-headed person. First of all, I took care of all the office. I would come in on a daily basis, open the mail, answer all the correspondence, answer the phone calls. I would log-in new manuscripts. I would circulate the manuscripts to the editorial board members. I would gatekeep the manuscripts, meaning if we received submissions that were entirely unusable or inappropriate for Frontiers, I would turn them right around and send them back to the author. I sent out all the rejection letters. I did all the filing. I took care of exchange journals in the thirteen years that I was the editor and publisher. We had wonderful exchange journals with all the other women studies journals and community journals all over the country and sometimes all over the world, and we would send them every copy of Frontiers and they would send us every copy of their magazine or journal. We also got a ton of books in for review from publishers all over the world. And this was something new that we hadn’t anticipated at all and we gave all those review books – sometimes we actually did review them – but most of the time we gave them to the Women’s Studies program where we were in an office with the Women’s Studies program so it was pretty cohesive in those days. So, what we did is we built up this massive library of books about women as they were coming out from publishers all over America and all over the world, and that was one of the reasons that it was good for us to stay with the Women’s Studies program, because we were providing them a chunk. We built up their own library. And this library was better and more extensive than the one at the university main library. And it was all housed inside the Women’s Studies program so that undergraduates and grad students could use it and 3 could check books out and could use it for research. So, it was quite a resource, and that happened without us even knowing that it would happen and anticipating it. Also, I did all the office work along with all the filing. I bought the supplies over at the bookstore and I supervised our work study student when we finally got one. We didn’t have one for years. But when we finally got one, I supervised her. And I cleaned the office. Now as managing editor and head copy editor, 2 what I would do is read all the manuscripts and make the agendas and take care of the minutes for the board meetings. So, it happened, as I said, about once a month. Every manuscript went through two edits and two proofreadings. So, our quality control was really high. We were very dedicated to turning out a very clean journal so that it would give credibility to us and to the field of women’s studies because when we started we were seen as not serious academically. One of the ways that we wanted to make sure that we were taken seriously was to produce a very clean manuscript and book that was not filled with typos. So I did one of those two edits, either the first edit or the second edit. The second edit was like a cleanup edit with fresh eyes to see the manuscript and make sure that nothing had been missed and that everything was clean from the typesetter. Then I did one of the proofings. The first proof on all the manuscripts…was done in conjunction with another person, often another board member or my editorial work study student, and those were done out loud. In other words, one of us would actually read the copy from the typesetter throughout the entire issue. So the entire issue was read out loud and then it was taken to a second proofreader who had never seen the manuscript and she did a second cleanup proofreading. She had never seen any of the manuscripts so her eye was very good. She was extremely competent. Best proofreader I ever worked with. And she caught all kinds of stuff that we had missed, because by then we were too 4 familiar with the manuscripts. I had read the manuscript maybe two or three times. I had worked on the revisions with the author and then I had done one of the edits, and then I had also done the first proof out loud. So, I was way too familiar with, and comfortable with the copy, and I needed somebody who had never seen it before to catch all the stuff we had missed. As I said, we worked with authors. I worked heavily with the authors on all the revisions. I helped to decide special issue themes and I worked closely with the guest editors. I also went to conferences and conventions to solicit special issues or special clusters from women all over the country. I sent out all the author contracts and I took the original manuscripts – which were done in a cut and paste. This is all hard copy. None of us had computers. There were no such things as personal computers. So everything was hard copy. Everything had been literally cut and pasted with Scotch tape and arrows and numbers and guidelines and these raw manuscripts were taken to a typesetter, and the typesetter would produce what were long rolls of shiny paper with the typesetting on them, and those rolls were each a manuscript. And the rolls were then taken to be proofread aloud and then from there they were taken to the second proofreader. And we marked errors on the proofs with something called a nonreproducing blue pen. So then all those errors and typos had to be corrected by the typesetter and reproofed once again. Then they were taken to somebody called a layout artist who’s now called a graphic designer. Everything that’s done electronically today with graphic design – all the page layout and makeup, the typesetting on the top with the page number and the article name – all that was done by hand by one person. They would take those long rolls of paper and put wax on the back and then they would cut them and stick them onto big sheets that were called “flats” and these were made out of heavy paper and the waxed rolls of copy were affixed to the paper and then these were taken eventually to a 5 printer after they had been checked and the printer would put them in a window and photograph them. I know – can you imagine? The technology was so different back then. So, if there was a photograph accompanying a manuscript there was something called a big red patch of paper. It was called “ruby litho,” and ruby litho would stand in for the photograph and the photograph was then made into a different plate and the two plates were married. From the typesetter to the designer and then back to the typesetter for corrections and then to the graphic designer for layout and paste up and then, when everything was set, I would lay out all the manuscripts on my living room floor and pretty much decide the table of contents. The table of contents, to a certain extent, was decided by the editorial board in advance, but until we knew the actual page count that we would get from the typesetter and the graphic designer we couldn’t lay out the table of contents. So that was all done at the last minute. And we were always running behind. So, this was always done at like a breakneck speed. And the person who physically took the manuscripts to the typesetter, to the graphic designer, and then to the printer was me. I was doing all the running. I was doing all the dropping, all the pickup. Occasionally some of the editors would drop manuscripts between each other and also, we used campus mail to the extent that we could and U.S. mail. So think about how slow and clunky that was. It was like trying to drive a car on wheels that were square instead of round. It was very slow and very clunky, very labor-intensive. Then I would take things to the printer and I would get something back from the printer called a “blue line.” And the blue line was a photographic image of the way the book was going to look when it was done. There was no changing copy. There were no more revisions. It was way too late for that. If we found an error in the blue line it cost a lot of money to correct it 6 because that page had to be re-photographed and that was expensive. So the only things we usually checked in blue line or corrected were things like if the page had been photographed crooked, or if there was like some major error, or if in fact they had put the wrong photograph into the ruby litho window – and they had put in photograph C where it should have been photograph A, so that would be checked and changed. From there we would get back from the printer these very large, heavy issues. Everything in those days was 8 ½ by 11 and very copy-intensive. So, the way it looked back then was two columns per page of (inaudible) copy. So that’s a lot of copy. So, we would get these very heavy issues back from the printer and then we would do the mailing. I’ll talk about the mailing again in a second. The other thing that I did as editor was that I would go to conferences and conventions all over the country and try to set up a Frontiers booth to sell subscriptions and mostly to solicit manuscripts and to ask for people to give us special themed issues. So, I went to the founding convention of the National Women’s Studies Association and I went to all the state [meetings] like the Colorado Women’s Studies Association and all the National Women’s Studies Association conferences and conventions every year. I went to the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History every other year. And these were great networking moments where I would meet other women who were doing women’s studies and women’s studies journals and periodicals from all over the country. A great way to solicit manuscripts. Now, this was all done on my own money and also during the thirteen years that I was editor and publisher I never got paid. I did it all for free. So, I was not only working for free for thirteen years but all of this outside work that I was doing – going all over the country – was not 7 funded by the Journal or the University of Colorado. I didn’t finish a Ph.D. so I never had an academic appointment. I never had time off from my academic duties to run Frontiers. I was doing it solely for the love of it. Interviewer: Can I ask you Kathi? Kathi: Yes. Interviewer: How much would you spend maybe annually out of your own pocket? Kathi: Boy, I don’t know, Elizabeth. Not that much. But I would say annually definitely around a couple thousand dollars, at least. Not a lot, but for me at the time, I was living on nothing. So, it was a lot. I do have to say that at the time my mother would give me an airline credit card and a rental car credit card, so that helped enormously. Let me go back to the mailing for a second because the mailing was very labor-intensive. Interviewer: Sure. Kathi: I would make all the subscription labels. I would use a keypunch to type them onto an 80-column computer card and then take those cards over to the computer center on campus and they would run out a set of labels and then the labels would be put on large manila envelopes with the return address and the postage. And then the issues would get stuffed into the envelopes 8 and they would be closed and then we would put them in zipcode order. We did the zip order by hand. So that was again very labor-intensive. And then these large issues would be loaded into heavy plastic gray, big long mail trays and the mail trays would then be taken by me over to the mail room on campus, and then they would go out to subscribers all over the country and all over the world. We couldn’t afford to use the postage rate that we should have used, so we used an illegal library rate. I had a rubber stamp made so each one of the envelopes got rubber stamped with something called “library rate” and we were not using library rate correctly. It was pretty illegal what we were doing. We were sending them out as books going to other libraries, when in fact they were going to individual subscribers and institutional subscribers all over the country. So that was very labor-intensive doing the mailings and it took quite a bit of time. So that was me as office manager and editor. So, now let me talk for a minute about me as publisher. As publisher – a publisher is like a movie producer. He or she assembles all the people, keeps track of the money, and basically keeps the show rolling. And that was what I did as publisher. I kept track of the money. We had two different accounts. One at the University of Colorado and one in downtown Boulder. The bank account in downtown Boulder was illegal. We weren’t supposed to have that. And I’ll get into this later about why. We didn’t have any status. We weren’t incorporated and we weren’t part of the university. We were sort of this free-floating object that didn’t have an institutional home or a legal status, and as long as we kind of kept quiet and kept our head down, nobody kicked us off campus. By staying on campus, what we got was office space – which was huge, 9 because we didn’t have to pay for that. So that was a major perk of staying aligned with the women’s studies program and access to the CU mailroom. I paid all the bills. I got the subscriptions. I updated the subscription list. I made the labels. I proofread all the labels. I made sure there were no duplicates. I would send out, at the end of an issue, I would send out two copies to the authors. That was how we paid them with two copies of the issue. I also learned all about copyright and I had to send the copyright forms to the Library of Congress with two copies of the issue. Also, we would send two issues to the University of Colorado library. It’s called Norlin Library and we would send the issues over there for archiving and at the end of each issue we sent all the files for that issue over to Norlin to be archived. And, in 2004, Norlin decided they didn’t have room for Frontiers anymore, so even though I hadn’t been there in many years, I came back to Norlin and spent a week in Boulder cleaning out the files from my thirteen years and then the next four years of what had been published after I had left. 3 I started in 1974 and I left in September of 1987. So I was in charge of twenty-six issues for thirteen years. So getting back to me as publisher, I took care of all the advertising, either advertising that we did outside to advertise Frontiers in like a convention book or in other journals and magazines. And also, I took care of all the advertising that was coming in that we did on an exchange basis and also on a paid basis. We didn’t get much paid advertising but when we got it, it was great. I also took care of all the flyers and brochures. I made all the little flyers advertising Frontiers that we would send out on our mailing list and we would buy and exchange other 10 mailing lists, so I wrote all the copy for the flyers and did all the design. I didn’t do the design layout but I ordered it from the woman who did our graphic design. One of the most intensive, difficult things that I learned how to do that I never had any experience doing before Frontiers, was buying print. There’s a whole method to how you deal with a printer and how you buy print and what kind of price you get for the amount of pages that you’re publishing, and with the binding. So getting printer bids was always very intense and difficult. But I kind of learned how to do it and I got pretty good at it. I also fulfilled all the individual subscription and single copy orders that came in and all the institutional subscription orders that came in between issues. So that was pretty much me as publisher. I think that takes care of a chunk of it. Interviewer: One of the things that I remember you speaking about in our first conversation was how you would physically drive to deliver some of these copies and pick up the ones that didn’t go. Can you talk really quickly about that? Kathi: Yes. We also distributed in those days directly to the bookstores -- we wanted to be part of the community so we wanted to be part of bookstores all over America and particularly in the Boulder/Denver area -- so one of the other editors and I would hop in her little Volkswagen and we would take copies, like five copies of the new issue, to bookstores all over the Boulder/Denver area and pick up the ones that hadn’t been sold from the previous issues. That was a lot of fun. It was a very bonding moment because, you know, it was interesting to see how we weren’t selling in the community, and that people weren’t picking us up as a magazine to be 11 read for pleasure or for enlightenment or education. And it began to be clear that we were more and more of an academic journal and less and less of a community journal or a magazine like Ms. Magazine where people would pick it up and read it for pleasure or edification. One thing I wanted to talk about was, for a minute, was the amount – and I know I’m jumping around here – was the amount of content that we produced in those twenty-six issues. Over the weekend I did a page count of how many pages we produced during those twenty-six issues: 2, 682 pages approximately and an 8 ½ by 11 size, two columns per page. The average page count per issue was 103 or 104 pages. That’s a lot of copy. And we had a big commitment to women of color from day one and a big commitment to lesbians from day one and a very big commitment to community women, working-class women and nonelite white women. And that played out in a variety of different ways but it was very important to us. We were very aware of the fact that most of the people on the original editorial board were white women and most of us had academic degrees. Many of them had Ph.D.’s. Almost all of us at least had a master’s degree. Very few of us had only the bachelor’s degree. So it was an educated, pretty much middle-class background. Many of the women had lower middle-class or middle-class backgrounds. I, myself, had come from a background of relative wealth and privilege. But I’d always been committed to movements. First, the anti-war movement when I was an undergraduate in college, and the Civil Rights Movement, to the extent that I could be a part of that, and then the Women’s Movement was just another natural extension of my political activism. When I was an undergraduate, I had been elected as a student senator for the student government and I had been one of the people who had negotiated, at the end of my senior year, negotiated with the administration to get something called EOP Programs, Educational 12 Opportunity Programs, for what were then called minority students on campus. These were scholarships and entry-level ways of encouraging people of color, students of color, to come into the mostly white University of Colorado. And that to me was a very significant part of my undergraduate life; and also, we got women’s hours on campus cancelled. So, let’s move onto something else. Interviewer: So really quickly. Did you grow up in Colorado? Kathi: No. I grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles. Interviewer: Tucson and L.A. Okay. And so, I think one of the things I wanted to ask you – because it seems like it has shifted since you all originally created it – when the board was originally put together I know there was a whole lot of intentionality with why and how the board would function and it seems like the board isn’t as active as it was in the initial years, and I think it was Dr. Jameson who was saying that you all had a very intentional creation of the board and I was wondering if you would want to talk about that at all, and kind of the vision that you saw for the board in and of itself, other than, you know, the actual working pieces of it? Kathi: You know, here’s the thing. All of these women except for me had other full-time jobs. Almost all of them had children. They had at least three or four other things going on in their lives and Frontiers of necessity had to be a third or fourth priority. They simply couldn’t give the time and the dedication to the Journal that was needed to keep it afloat. I had that time and I had 13 that opportunity, and I just loved it. This was something that I was really, really good at, producing a publication, being a publisher, being an editor, and it was the only thing I really wanted to do. So the fact that their dedication fell off and they didn’t work as hard or put as much time and the hours in, was a function of the fact that they had three or four other things that had to be priority before Frontiers. And so that’s how things evolved eventually. The amount of labor simply wasn’t equal because it couldn’t be. They simply didn’t have the time or the dedication. The original board, the original five of us, were extremely close. We were really friends. It was truly a sisterhood, and I don’t want to call it a sorority because it wasn’t, you know, the kind of elite sorority that you think of. And also, we were from quite different backgrounds. But we really bonded. We really loved each other. We would go on retreats. We would have potluck dinners. We were all really good cooks. And we just were very close. We went to each other’s weddings and the bar mitzvahs and births of each other’s children, and after that period of time – after that initial five or six people eventually left town, they left Boulder or they moved on to other things – things were never the same after that. There was never that bond. There was never the camaraderie or the deep sisterhood that we had at the very beginning. And it became much more of a professional group. We were there for professional reasons. I used to say it could have been the biology department with a committee on undergraduate prerequisites or requirements for graduation. It didn’t have that much to do with women’s studies or feminism or political commitment or that outreach to society, that outreach to women who weren’t in academia. And so it evolved. It changed. And it wasn’t as much fun. 14 Interviewer: So from what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong, right now Frontiers – I think they have an editorial collective of the coeditors, and then an editorial board. And so it sounds like originally the collective and the board were almost one and the same? Kathi: Pretty much. The editorial collective was the group of women who actually would come to meetings and their assignments were to read manuscripts, edit manuscripts, and come to meetings. The associate editors or the editorial board were women who didn’t come to meetings, but read manuscripts for us occasionally or when a manuscript was in her academic field. Or, for instance, if it had, say lesbian content, and we wanted someone who was a lesbian to read it and see if it felt okay to publish. And especially with ethnic content. But yes, they weren’t the same in the sense that they didn’t have to come to meetings and their commitment was much less. And actually, a lot of it was window dressing. We had women’s names on the masthead who actually didn’t do that much work. We had, for instance, a poetry editor. So by the time, say, a poetry submission got to her it had already been read by almost everybody and it was close to either being published or being rejected. So she didn’t have that much to read in any given year. So, the commitment was much lower. It was a much more casual association. Interviewer: Okay. That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that for me. And so, I know that you didn’t get tenure or promotion by being part of the Journal. Can you talk a little bit more about how the institution did or didn’t value Frontiers? 15 Kathi: Yes. Most of the time they didn’t even know we were there. We tried to keep a very low profile because we didn’t want them to know we were there, because we didn’t want them to throw us off campus. Because if they threw us off campus, we would lose our mailing rate status and most of all we would lose our free office space, and that was really crucial. We had no money. We couldn’t afford to do anything. We started out with a small grant the very first year from the University of Colorado graduate school of $3,500, and that was for our first volume, three issues. After that we got a little bit of spotty money here and there from the university. We never got any grants outside the university and the university didn’t give us any money. There was no funding of a faculty full-time equivalent with release time for Frontiers from having to teach, say, six courses a year or four courses a year the way most faculty tenure lines are structured. And we knew that my free labor was really a huge chunk of keeping us afloat. And without that it was going to be very hard to sustain the Journal. So… Interviewer: Do you…? Kathi: Go ahead. Interviewer: No, no, no, I was just going to say I’m really interested about when you all decided that it was time for the Journal to leave Colorado and how you kind of, you know, helped to gesture it out what that process was like, but please finish your thought if I interrupted. Kathi: It’s okay. I forgot what I was going to say. 16 Okay the ending of my association with Frontiers is like boom, huge explosion. Lots of fighting. Angry times. Sad ending. By the time I left in 1987, after thirteen years, I was not speaking to the current editors, the women on the editorial board, and they were not speaking to me. It’s a long story, so I’ll try to make it short. Here’s part one. Part one: I realized that we were unsustainable. We all realized we were unsustainable under that model. We didn’t think we were going to last. We didn’t think we were going to last beyond volume one, volume two at the most. By now we’re in volume nine or ten and it had obviously become unsustainable. We needed more labor that was paid. We couldn’t keep going with no help from the University of Colorado or someone else. I, on my own, researched all the other university presses all over America that had journals divisions – and I was following the model of Signs, that was connected to the University of Chicago. And the editorial board would move around from different campuses, but it was owned by the University of Chicago. Interviewer: Okay. Kathi: I got a whole bunch of names. Not a whole bunch. A handful of names of other university presses that had journals divisions. I wrote to all of them. They all turned us down except one. And that was the University of Texas Press. I schmoozed them. They schmoozed me. We communicated; we got along like a house afire. I flew to Austin and met with the head of the journals division. We loved each other. It was a deal. We were this close to being done – to putting the final signatures on a deal for the University of Texas Press to acquire Frontiers – when, boom, they changed their mind, they turned us down, and they acquired a different women 17 studies journal instead. I was devastated. And I knew there was really nowhere else to go. At the time there was no other university press that wanted a women’s studies journal. I had already gone through all of them. I then tried to help find a new editor to replace me and that person was Michele Barale. Michele Barale had a Ph.D. She was an open lesbian and she was already teaching at the University of Colorado. But the University of Colorado refused to give her a faculty tenure line because she had her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and they had very strict rules about not hiring their own graduates, their own Ph.D. people. Interviewer: Yeah. Kathi: Which is not uncommon in universities all over the country. Interviewer: Right. Kathi: So they turned Michele down, at which point the editorial board that was still there decided that they could go ahead without me and without Michele, and they decided to put a person who had no editorial experience whatsoever into the chair of the editorship, and that person was a librarian. And she had no women’s studies experience, and no editorial experience, but that was whom they chose. They went on without me and they lasted for about four years before they finally got acquired by the University of New Mexico Women’s Studies Program. 18 There was one last incident at the University of Colorado that really made the explosion irretrievable. The president….one night I’m working – and I’m working like eight, ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, six days a week – and one Friday night the president of the university happens to wander into the Women’s Studies office, late on a Friday night, and I’m there all alone working. I knew who he was and I welcomed him in, I showed him around, I said look at this, look at that, look at all we’re doing. Frontiers is bringing in great admiration to the University of Colorado because we’re published here in association with the Women’s Studies program – would you please give us some money? And he said yes. And then he reneged and I was devastated. So I did something. Let me just finish this little bit of a story. I did something that I probably shouldn’t have done. I wrote him a letter and basically said you reneged on your promise; you’re a poo poo head. And he got furious and the editorial board got even more furious. So they wrote a letter to him after mine and said, she doesn’t represent us, we disown her, we disavow her, we would love to have your money, please give us some money – whatever you can spare – and don’t listen to her, she’s leaving anyway and she does not speak for us. By the time I then left in September of ’87, that was it. We weren’t speaking to each other and there was no goodbye luncheon. There was no thank you letter. No bouquet of flowers. No celebration. Nothing. No goodbye. In September, I put my keys on my desk. I had trained their new undergraduate editorial assistant as much as I had time for. I left my keys on the desk, closed the door behind me, and left after thirteen years with nothing. No money. No tenure. Nothing. Just thirteen years of something that I was really, really proud of – and I have no regrets. I would do it all again. But it was a very bitter ending. Not bittersweet, just bitter. And by then I was broken. I had a serious case of burnout. I was brittle. I was utterly exhausted and I 19 came to San Diego and started trying to recover and make a new life for myself as a freelance editor. So, it did not end well. Interviewer: I’m really sorry to hear that. And I guess I wonder because I know it was Dr. Jameson who said that you connected her with Frontiers when it moved to UNM. So was that that already in the process when you left or how did that happen because it was a few years later that it went to UNM, correct? 4 Kathi: Yes. I don’t really know. I mean, I knew she was there but by the time – that was four years later after me. I left in ’87 and they moved in ’91. No. I really didn’t have much to do with it, except Betsy and I were still friends. This is all a blur to me. I don’t really know how they moved it to New Mexico and how that happened. I was not part of it. And I was very happy to see that they were moving. You know it was so bitter between us. They were right to keep the Journal alive. There was part of me that thought the whole Journal should end in ’87, because it was really unsustainable. They were right; I was right. They were wrong; I was wrong. Both things were true. The Journal probably should have ended. On the other hand, keeping it alive was a wonderful thing. I’m kind of glad they did it. And now forty-seven years later it looks marvelous. You know, you’re still going. Frontiers is still going. It’s a prestigious journal. It’s well known and it has that wonderful track record. Part of being credible is just longevity. The fact that they’ve been publishing for forty-seven years is an absolute miracle. But, yeah, the move to New Mexico, to UNM, is kind of a blur to me and I don’t know much about it because I wasn’t part of it. But I’m glad they did it. I was very glad 20 that the University of New Mexico gave them the financial support and grounding that they needed and then from there it moved to Washington State and then Arizona State and then Ohio State and then to the University of Utah. So the most important factor that happened in there was the acquisition of the Journal, the buying of the Journal by the University of Nebraska Press. That whole business office, subscription, promotional activity, all that part of the business office, all that being a publisher that I had been doing, once it was transferred over to a formal university press with a journals division who knew how to do that kind of stuff and was already doing it for – I don’t know – three to seven to ten other journals, then it became doable. Interviewer: Right. Kathi: And then the editorial office moving around and getting like faculty release time and maybe time for an editorial assistant and office space – that became much more doable. But doing both things was just unsustainable with no money. Interviewer: So, I’m wondering then, did the founding members envision Frontiers being something that would move from institution to institution or was it just kind of not part of that vision of the original founders? Kathi: No, not at all. Not at all at the beginning. You’ve got to really understand. We did not think we were going to last. We did not think we were a permanent thing. The thought of forty21 seven years of publishing was completely out of this world. We didn’t have a vision for the future. And the fact that there were then these journals that started that became part of the university, or part of the university press journals division – that was a totally new model. That was definitely not our vision at the beginning. We really didn’t have a vision at the beginning. We didn’t think we were going to last. We were very fragile. We had no money. We had no subscriptions. By the time I left, we had still not broken through about a thousand subscribers, between individuals and institutional subscriptions. That’s not enough. That’s not enough money to keep you going. Interviewer: Right. Kathi: And so there was no vision of what was going to become of us. We really didn’t have a vision. I think we thought we’d stay at the University of Colorado forever and then eventually we would get, you know, support and money and faculty leave time to be the editor, but that didn’t really happen. Interviewer: Okay. So, most of my interviews have been about forty-five minutes, which we just hit. Do you still have time to talk a little bit more? Kathi: Yes. Unfortunately, I can talk for much longer than you probably (inaudible) Elizabeth. 22 Interviewer: No, you have so much important knowledge and history that we really want to get so thank you for your time. Kathi: Oh, my pleasure. It’s really my pleasure. Interviewer: So, let’s see. How was the Journal’s name chosen? Kathi: That was chosen by…Alanna Preussner came up with the idea of the word Frontiers. And we meant it to be partly a new scholarship from the west and partly just the new frontiers of women’s studies. We had a lot of trouble choosing a name and there was already a very good journal called Feminist Studies that was publishing back east and then Signs started at the University of Chicago at almost the same time we did. They had big support from the University of Chicago and a very prestigious editor who had already done a lot of publishing, and they tended to get the first-rate manuscripts and they quickly became the most prestigious of the journals. We were in the top three and I think that was amazing. It was hard for us to get that because we were in the west and most of publishing and women’s studies was happening on the east coast. It was very east coast centric. So, for us to be in the middle of the country in Colorado was unusual and we were trying to establish an identity. That name caused us a certain amount of difficulty and discomfort because people tended to call us a regional journal. “You’re only about the west ,” and that was looked down upon and seen as not legitimate. So, it was both a great idea and a not-so-great idea. But the night it happened we thought it was brilliant. We thought it was the best name we’d ever heard of and we all loved it and fell in love with it on the spot and 23 that was that, Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies. There was a certain amount of controversy over the word women or women’s and we went with women studies rather than women’s studies, which I think was a mistake and to this day it’s commonly misspelled because all the programs in the country are women’s studies not women studies. There was a reason behind it that made sense to us at the time, but, frankly, I still believe that it was a mistake. Interviewer: Dr. Jameson actually went into that, about rather than being a subject or a possessive and she talked about that a lot, yeah. Kathi: Right. Interviewer: And then, was it the intention – or what was the intention behind setting up the Journal as a nonprofit? Kathi: This is very complicated and it’s going to take me a minute to talk about it. We didn’t set it up as a nonprofit. We had absolutely no status. I don’t know how to explain to you that we were like this free-floating nonincorporated entity. Interviewer: That’s right. Kathi: That did not have status. We were not owned by the University of Colorado and we did not copyright our contents in the name of the Regents of the University of Colorado. We did not 24 go outside and incorporate as, like, either a nonprofit or a for-profit. We were none of those things. We had no legal status. We didn’t pay any taxes. We were skirting the line. And one of the reasons we kept such a low profile at the University of Colorado is we didn’t really want anybody to find out that we were there and that we were operating essentially illegally. We weren’t incorporated. We weren’t a nonprofit. We weren’t part of the university, so we really had no legal status whatsoever. Interviewer: So this happened later then. Kathi: Yes. It happened much later and I think probably when it was acquired by the University of Nebraska Press – that may have been when it incorporated as a nonprofit. But that was the only way to go, was as a nonprofit. I mean, clearly, we weren’t making any profit. There was no money. We weren’t looking to profit or like throwing weekend retreats with the money that we were making. It was hard for us to stay alive financially. Interviewer: Right. I remember at our initial kind of informal conversation you talked about how the language “hobby” was used when referring to the Journal. Could you expound a little bit on that and why? Kathi: You know “hobby” is a legal word that the IRS uses when you’re running a business that isn’t making any money. That’s their legal definition of a hobby. If you’re running a press and you’re not making any money, it’s a hobby. It’s not a business enterprise that you can then use 25 with tax deductions. So that’s why it was called a hobby. And it was seen as not legitimate. It was seen as illegitimate and it was seen not as a business trying to make money or as a nonprofit. We weren’t a business that was in business to make a profit. And this is all part of that amorphous status that we had where we were neither on campus or off campus. We weren’t really part of the University of Colorado and we weren’t following their rules and we weren’t really an off-campus business following IRS and legal incorporation rules. We were… Interviewer: You were in survival. Kathi: We were in survival mode for a lot of years. Interviewer: So, you mentioned a little bit about how – I’m sorry, I’m going to jump around to so we can get to the rest of these questions. Kathi: That’s okay. Interviewer: You mentioned a little bit about how originally you envisioned Frontiers as being something similar, not to Ms., but kind of a bridge between Ms. and an academic journal, but that the community could have access to and maybe pick up at a bookstore. Do you think that it ever was something that was read by the community or that it shifted to the academic audience relatively quickly? 26 Kathi: It was a part of the nonacademic community. People did read it for pleasure. People did buy it for pleasure. People who didn’t have academic faculty positions were subscribers at the beginning and we really did appeal to a lot of women that weren’t in the university community, who didn’t have faculty appointments -- but that gradually slowed down. We lost those subscribers over time as we became more academic. And it became less like Ms. Magazine, less like a magazine that people would read for pleasure. But at the beginning we did want that and we did do a lot of outreach. And we did try to be part of a community and part of women’s activism in the community and publish articles that were of interest to people – about mothers and daughters, women and peace, women and abortion, women and violence, domestic battery. All kinds of things that weren’t necessarily for academic women. The other thing that was really important is that we tried to have accessible language. At the beginning, if you look back over some of our articles, they did not have that academic verbiage and the sound of an academic article. Their titles didn’t have colons in them and, you know, like a line saying blah, blah, blah study of so and so. Interviewer: Yeah. Kathi: And mostly we tried to strip out the language that was off putting to people who weren’t inside the academy. And when we first started there weren’t that many Women’s Studies programs and there weren’t that many women who had faculty appointments. So it was a much more varied group and we tried to have a variety of voices that would appeal to people who were nonacademically ensconced, entrenched. That went by the wayside after a while because our 27 subscription base tended more toward the academic and our readership and the articles we were sent, the submissions we got, just became gradually over time more and more and more scholarly and then the language that was being used in those articles became more academic. And the fact that there were, like, forty-one footnotes to, you know, a ten-page article. That’s more academic. And the language, the tone, became more and more off putting if you weren’t part of that world, part of that academic world. There was less and less of a reason, less and less of incentive. The articles were more and more narrow and specialized and more and more exclusionary. They just didn’t invite people in. They kind of pushed people away. That’s my point of view. Not everybody agreed with that. And that was just the way we had to go. That was the way the money went. And to be acquired, say, for instance by the University of Nebraska Press journals division we had to be more academic. It had to be a magazine less and a journal more and it had to go more and more and more toward institutional subscriptions and more and more and more toward Women’s Studies programs and toward women who were inside the university system. Interviewer: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. So, was there ever like community events or actual physical engagements with community to promote the Journal or was it mostly the access of language in the articles and the way that the work was presented that was the community engagement piece? Kathi: To a certain extent. The one thing that I remember very happily for a few years was that Frontiers would not only go to conferences and conventions all over the country, most of which were academic, but we also did a thing called International Women’s Day. And we would have 28 like a booth or a table at these nonacademic day-long conferences, usually in Denver, but sometimes all over the Denver/Boulder metro area. And these were definitely engagements with nonacademic women and we would present all kinds of really interesting programs for women in the community, usually centering around International Women’s Day, the history of women, or ways for women to get help like, again, domestic battery, domestic shelters, or how to start a business, or special child care options that were available. So it was a very nonacademic outreach into the community and it was kind of specialized. It didn’t last for very long and there wasn’t much of it, but I was very proud of the little bit of it that we did – and a lot of that I did with Betsy Jameson. Interviewer: Okay. How neat. And, so, I mean you kind of talked about this, but I’m curious. What do you believe were some of the major accomplishments of the Journal then? Kathi: I think the content…in those twenty-six issues – that we published so much content. I mean we pumped out an enormous amount of content and an enormous amount of copy that laid a basis, a foundation, for research for other people. I think that was one of the most important things that we did. The other thing that I think that we did that was really important was the fact that we had an absolute commitment to women of color. We had a strong commitment to lesbians. We had a strong commitment to women in the west. We were some of the earliest publishers of articles and manuscripts and creative work by Chicanas, by Native American women, by Asian women, and by lesbians. And that strong commitment we held fast to during 29 the thirteen years that I was there. That to me is the most important thing that we did. And also, to women in the west. The single most important thing that we ever did was publish women’s oral histories. It was volume 2, number 2, the Women’s Oral History issue and that was dynamite. That issue was so big that we reprinted it three times and the other thing was, then we published more oral histories. We published another issue called Women’s Oral History II. And the fact that we did these oral histories over and over and over – it was a big part of our commitment – it was also a huge financial success. Those issues were used in classrooms and they became a huge financial basis for us. Those oral history issues funded a lot of the other issues that we didn’t have money to print. So the women’s oral history – and then it came out as a reader, a Frontiers reader, Women’s Oral History – and it was edited by Sue Armitage and this was in 2002, and it collected all the women’s oral histories that we had published in Frontiers. The reason this was so significant is because it completely opened up the field of women’s history to a whole new avenue of valuing women and valuing the work that women did, and it also really put Frontiers on the map. And the other great thing about it is, in those oral histories we published women talking normally. In other words, they weren’t using that academic filter that you get from people with Ph.D.’s. They were talking about how they worked in the mines or in the sewing mills back east. Or just the everyday housework that they did along with maybe a full-time job. Or they talked about how during World War II they had been part of an airplane making plant. These oral histories were beautiful to read and anybody could read them. They were totally accessible and not done through an academic filter. Maybe the work around them that told their story was done with an academic filter, but we never edited the women speaking themselves. We never edited 30 them to make them sound upper class or white or academically trained. We kept their language exactly as they spoke. And that to me was really important and it was very accessible, and lots of people could read those stories and be enlightened and illuminated by these women who had lived what they thought were ordinary lives but in recording them we made them extraordinary. Interviewer: Right. Awesome. And speaking of women’s history, one of the questions that we had, was there any…I mean you talked a little bit about the tensions, fatigue, the accomplishments, but were there any like historical moments such as pandemics or disasters that happened during your time at the Journal that you wanted to highlight as being important in any way to how the Journal kind of talked, or what was published or how you all decided to politically align with something? Kathi: I saw that as question 27 and I’m looking at it right now on my screen. And no, there was nothing catastrophic like that. No pandemics. No disasters. There was not a 9-11-01. There were elections and historical movements between the right and the left but there was nothing extraordinary that I remember as a political event. I think one of the underlying themes of this entire period was abortion, was access to abortion. And that was something that we published articles about frequently. There was definitely a peace movement, women and peace, antiwar movement, but there were no like significant historical moments. There was nothing like the COVID-19 pandemic we’re going through right now. But I can speak for a moment about tension, fatigue – huge. Burnout – huge. Exhaustion – huge. Boredom – huge. I mean people just got exhausted. They burned out. In a sense there 31 was no incentive for them to keep going. After a while people just dropped away. And I don’t know how to explain it other than exhaustion and fatigue and then just people got sick of fighting. There was a lot of fighting on the editorial boards about what to publish, what direction to go in – and that got to be old. You know, that’s very tedious to be fighting with your colleagues. And also, the board turnover. You know, people would come, people would go. And they were less committed. As I said, it was more of a committee to them or a professional commitment. But it wasn’t something that was in their bones. It wasn’t something that they loved and wanted to do for the love of it or because they were part of the movement. And so, that was difficult to find new people to replace the board members when they left. That became harder and more difficult. And as I said, the lack of love, the lack of cohesion among those board members was difficult. There were a lot more tensions. There were a lot more fights. I said to my husband, like soon before I left, I said something to the effect of – I can do the work, I just can’t go to the meetings anymore. I’m sick of having meetings with these women and fighting with them. But I’m glad that I reconstituted the editorial board. There was a moment in 1980 when everyone left and I could have become like the sole editor and decided – the sole arbiter of what went in the Journal and just have a bunch of readers and not had meetings anymore and not had retreats or potlucks, just did the work like any other journal – like, you know, the Journal of American Geology. But instead, I reconstituted the board because I really believed in that collective energy and that collective decision-making and I really wanted that to be the way that we went – but it was exhausting. It took a toll. 32 Interviewer: I think about all the work that it takes to be a part of a collective and to create a collective and to facilitate a collective and I wonder though without it – even though it was far from perfect for those who were in the midst of it, I wonder if without it the Journal would have ceased to exist, you know, after so many years, and so for all of the exhaustion that came from being part of a collective and facilitating it, it seems to have at least withstood the test of time, for sure. Kathi: Also, I think it would have been a very different journal. It would have been, as I say, like it could have been like the Journal of American Geology. It wouldn’t have had like a feminist identity. It wouldn’t have had that esprit de corps and that sense of “we were changing the world.” And we did change the world. Women’s Studies, the Women’s Movement, women’s journals absolutely changed the world. And we were part of making that critical mass. We were part of making it legitimate – and now in academia there’s hardly a major university in America that doesn’t have a women’s studies program or some kind of department addressing women’s studies, gender studies, lesbian studies. This is now an accepted part of most colleges and universities all over the country. And by publishing like we did, we helped to establish critical mass and by critical mass, acceptance and legitimacy. Interviewer: Right. Most definitely. It wasn’t handed to anybody. It was definitely fought for. And I guess one of the questions I wanted to get into before closing was if you could talk a little bit about the moments of tension – particularly that moment in history where you all had to deal with a lawsuit and how Frontiers navigated that? 33 Kathi: You know, let me just finish talking about for a second – by reconstituting the editorial board one of the things that happened was that I was consistently outvoted on what manuscripts went in and what manuscripts were rejected, and I believed in that. I wanted that. It didn’t make me always happy. It particularly was gruesome when a manuscript that I really didn’t like got accepted by the editorial board and then I had to edit it and proofread it. So I had to live with that manuscript for many long months to come, and that caused tension and difficulty. But I accepted that. It was part of the tradeoff of having a real editorial board that was more involved and more central to the editorial decisions. There was a very difficult issue and this was in volume 6. I think it’s volume 6, number 3. We did an issue on Native American women called “Native Women of the Americas: Our Voice, the Air,” and we had a Native American woman who was the guest editor. That issue lost its way. We got way bogged down and there was a lot of fighting between the guest editor and the editorial board. And I think this was the moment – unlike the issue on Chicanas which had gone so beautifully and so smoothly and so happily, and our guest editor and I just got along great and we worked so well together and the issue was a gem. It was one of the best issues we ever published. The issue on Native Americans really exposed the fact that it was a group of white women stepping into a world they absolutely didn’t know and didn’t understand. Just one piece of it was the fact that spirituality is woven into every ounce of fabric of a native person’s life. And that’s not true among white people. Their spirituality tends to be on Sunday or Saturday when they go to their church or their temple and worship. It’s not something that they see as a part of their whole, and indigenous people do. And so that was a huge difficulty. Also, there was 34 a lot of difficulty because the writing for some of the submissions was really not very good. The guest editor and I began to grow apart and we were having more and more trouble. The space between the guest editor and the editorial board was even worse. I was kind of in the middle trying to mediate between the editorial board members and the guest editor. We published in that issue over thirty pages of bibliography on Native American women and it was written by a white male, and that made the guest editor very angry. She didn’t want that in the issue. So, here’s the lawsuit. As part of the issue, we got a submission from a woman whose name I don’t remember and she was not indigenous. She was not a Native American woman. We phone called her and said we would accept the submission with revisions. In the meantime, out of the blue came to us the fact that that manuscript had been plagiarized, and worst of all it had been plagiarized from a native woman. Well, we could not publish that. So we let her know that we were not accepting the manuscript for publication and that we had to reject it. I’m not even sure we told her that we knew it had been plagiarized, or great portions of it had been plagiarized, and that we knew from whom it had been plagiarized, but we just said some you know kind of vanilla thing about we can’t publish your manuscript after all. She got very aggressive and turned around and threatened to sue us for breach of promise. As I said to you on the phone, not breach of contract, because we hadn’t sent her a contract yet. Well, we just freaked out. I mean none of us had ever been in a lawsuit before. We didn’t know what to do. We had no money for an attorney and we most of all did not want this exposed to the University of Colorado because this is the kind of thing that would get us kicked off campus. This is the kind of thing that would make us look bad and make the University of Colorado look bad and then they would have to take action against us and boot us off campus. We were able to get an 35 attorney – a wonderful woman, Fran, who worked for us for free, pro bono – and she talked to the author’s lawyer and we negotiated it all out and they didn’t sue us and we didn’t publish the work, and so it was resolved but it was terrifying. We were scared to death. We thought it was going to be the end of the Journal and that was that. That issue on Native American women took nine months to produce. Usually an issue took three to six months. So this was like another extra-long time. Plus, by this time it had cost us a fortune. Even though we had a lawyer who had been working for free, we had spent a lot of money on this issue and it ended badly. It ended with the guest editor being furious at the editorial board and the editorial board being absolutely puzzled about why she was so angry and why things had gone so badly between us – but that was the single worst issue I worked on and it still gives me a lot of heartache. On the other hand, I’m very pleased with what we published in the issue, ultimately, because one of the poems won a prize in something called the Pushcart Prize that year and that was one of the poems by one of the Native American women. So I still believe we made a great contribution to women’s studies scholarship. We were the first academic journal to do an issue on Native American women and I still think it stands the test of time and it was a wonderful issue and a great contribution, but, boy, what went on in the background was no fun at all. Interviewer: And that was, you said, when you were only six issues in? Kathi: No, that was volume 6. That was volume 6. I don’t have it in front of me, unfortunately, so I can’t tell you the year but I think it was in the early ‘80’s. 36 Interviewer: Okay. Kathi: I think it was volume 6, number 3, but I should have brought it into the room with me but I didn’t have it. One of the great things that I want to point out is that in volume 8, number 3, 1986, just before I left, we did a ten-year cumulative index of everything that we had published up to that point, and it’s really wonderful to look through it. I had forgotten all the amazing stuff that we published. But it details, for instance, one of the things that I am the most proud of, as I said, is all the U.S. women of color and the immigrant ethnic women that we published about – Asian women, black women, Chicanas, immigrant, ethnic women, Indian/Native women. We were one of the first and most dedicated to publishing and it wasn’t easy to get. One of the things that I did – that I really went the extra mile on – was a play called “Latina” that we got into the Chicana issue and I flew out to Los Angeles to meet the woman who had written that play so that we could get an excerpt of it; and another was the Black Museum of the American West that I found in Denver. And I went down to Denver and made friends with that gentleman so that we could feature a couple of photographs from his museum about Black women in the American west. So a lot of these extra special outreach efforts that I went to – like really went the extra mile. Meeting someone, schmoozing them, begging for their submission, doing whatever it took to include people of color and especially lesbians, too, because we just had to do it. It was the right thing to do and it also made for much richer issues. Much richer, you know. A much wider variety of opinions and stories of women. 37 Interviewer: And so it was an active, intentional recruitment of what was actually in the Journal, it wasn’t by chance. A lot of these people you had to really outreach to and travel to meet them. That is quite a lot of energy. Kathi: I know – I’m tired. I’ve got to take a nap now just talking about it. And you know, I haven’t been there for thirty-four years, so remembering all this – I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few things here or there, but it was a very intense time and it was also wonderful. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I loved what I did for thirteen years. I just loved it. And it was a lot of fun and there was a lot of camaraderie and at the end of it, though, I was very burned out. I was very exhausted and to a certain extent discouraged, but now after forty-seven years of publishing, I’m just like so thrilled that Frontiers is still alive and still going and that it has these many years of tradition under its belt and is thought of highly and regarded as a very prestigious journal all over the country. Interviewer: I think that after speaking to one of the editors from almost every state at this point, I think the only state that I haven’t spoke to an editor in yet is Washington. I feel like the spirit of Frontiers that was originally envisioned by you all has definitely maintained. I know that there’s a whole lot of desire to keep, you know, centering marginalized voices in every issue, and it seems like everyone has committed to this idea of mentoring folks through the publishing process, which is a whole lot of work for the editor. So I definitely feel like the spirit of Frontiers has maintained. 38 Kathi: That’s really good to hear, Elizabeth. Thank you. That’s great. That makes me very happy. Interviewer: Yeah. I hope so because you all, particularly you, put a whole lot of work and energy and your life into the Journal. And I guess we could kind of move into just like these last three questions. And I’m wondering – I know you probably keep up with the Journal, but how have you seen it shift since you were involved? Kathi: Actually, my dear new friend, I don’t keep up with the Journal so much anymore. After the fortieth anniversary issue – I wrote a little essay for the people at Ohio State – after that, I had had a subscription up to that point, but after that I stopped subscribing. And I think you know that I sent all my back issues to the University of Utah for their archives and to use as research material. So I haven’t seen it in the last five years or seven years. I haven’t kept up with it. I do know that – and I won’t go into this at length, because I think my contribution to your oral histories has to do with when I was there, rather than my analysis of where they are now – it is a totally different journal in the sense that it is so academic. I cannot imagine a woman who doesn’t have a faculty position picking up a copy of Frontiers in today’s world and reading it for pleasure or edification. It’s just very academic and that’s okay. That’s the way it had to be. In order to get funding and legitimacy, it had to go in that direction. I don’t say negative things about it. It’s just very different from what we started with and very different from who I am, and what I would want to read. I just love it, though. I admire it and I’m so glad that it’s still going 39 and that it has such a strong commitment to marginalized people, to gender issues that are broader than feminist issues, that it has a commitment to LGBTQ issues, and that it mostly has a tradition of publishing multi-ethnic women and their stories. That to me is one of the most important parts of the legacy of Frontiers and I am really glad to see it going. I think it’s made an impact on the field of women’s studies. I think it’s seen as one of the top three journals in the field all over the world and that’s just wonderful to see. It’s a happy legacy. Interviewer: And I guess finally, considering all that, if you could envision anything for Frontiers, not considering how heavily academic it is portrayed to be right now, what would you envision? Kathi: You know it’s really not for me to say, but that’s ducking out of your question. The thing that I might want to see more of is, maybe, personal essays. Stories of women in the real world talking about how they work, how they raise kids, because when we started it was very hard – and it still is, but it’s less hard now – to have a full-time professional career and children. Now there are daycare centers. There are ways of managing that difficulty. But back then it was almost impossible. And it was seen as – if you’re going to be a full-time professional and get a faculty tenure-track position – that was all you did. You weren’t allowed to also be married and have kids. So to do both like Carol did – Carol Pearson and Betsy Jameson – to do that kind of work and a lot of personal also, and Renee Horowitz also, all of those women did both. And some of them didn’t have full-time tenure-track positions, but all of them had children, and they were all raising their kids and working full-time. So maybe more stories of that kind of thing. 40 Since I’m a widow, it might be fun to read more – I mean not necessarily fun – but that might be an interesting topic to have a cluster of articles about. About how women navigate widowhood. And it could be with a male partner or a female partner. It’s the same. Of course, no matter when you lose your loved one it doesn’t matter what the gender is, it’s still a huge loss. So maybe stuff like that. Maybe more personal essays. More stuff about the real world that doesn’t have anything to do with being on a faculty or having a faculty tenure-track position. Interviewer: Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think for me it’s exciting to get recentered in the personal. Kathi: Thank you. That’s well said. Interviewer: And is there anything that you would like to state that you would like to see in this particular project, in this oral history project, the fiftieth anniversary collection? Kathi: I think you’re doing a heck of a job. I’m thrilled and I’m just delighted and it’s a real pleasure to help you. I did say to Kimberly over the weekend that I remembered that I’m still in very good contact with one of my work-study students who lives in the Bay Area and I can give you her name and contact if you want to talk to someone who worked with the Journal as an undergraduate. I think you’re doing a fabulous job. Whatever you do with these archives, I think it’s wonderful to do it now because we are aging and we won’t be around forever. So that’s the great thing about oral history, but also the fragile thing about oral history – is that you need to do 41 as many as you can as fast as you can before women in their 80’s and 90’s pass away. Most of us now in our 70’s, mid-70’s, are still doing pretty good, but I think you’re doing a wonderful job. I’m delighted to see this happening and I think your questions are great. I just wish you all the best. Anything else I can do to help you, I’m happy to do. Interviewer: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for your time and for all of your years of dedication to this Journal. Those of us who get to inherit this legacy are really grateful. Kathi: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. Interviewer: And I’m going to go ahead and stop the recording now. Kathi: Okay, dear. End of file. The 1974 original core group of the Frontiers Editorial Collective was Carol Pearson, Betsy Jameson, Alanna Preussner, Renee Horowitz, and me. 1 Another very important editorial duty that I was in charge of, was making the internal Frontiers style sheet. All the editors and proofreaders used the same one, insuring consistency manuscript to manuscript. 2 42 All these Frontiers original files, records, and archival materials were moved to, and archived by, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. My personal papers are archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA. For further research, see also, Frontiers volume 36, number 2, Fortieth Anniversary Issue, 2015, pp. 194-96; and Patrice McDermott, Politics and Scholarship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge, University of Illinois Press, 1994. 3 I honestly have no memory of helping Betsy Jameson with the Frontiers move from the University of Colorado, Boulder, to the University of New Mexico in 1991. But, when asked, my very good friend Betsy writes to tell me that, "My memory of the Boulder end of things is hazy. My memory is that you called me and asked if I could pull it off." She then goes on to describe how the Journal went to UNM (Jameson to George email, March 11, 2021). Betsy also notes that this is when Frontiers became incorporated; not, as I speculated, at the time it was acquired by the University of Nebraska Press. 4 43