Donations to our department’s general fund would help us provide:
- Undergraduate Leadership Training. Many of you were involved in socially significant extracurricular activities (Sex Out Loud, Campus Women’s Center, Gender and Sexuality Campus Center, Domestic Abuse Intervention Services) while you were here. Many of you expressed interest in attending leadership-training conferences to enhance what you could bring to these organizations. If twenty-five of you gave us $20, we could help a student become a feminist leader.
- Undergraduate Internships. For the past two decades, Gender and Women’s Studies has offered an internship experience, connecting our students with community organizations serving women or LGBTQ+ communities. These courses bring feminist theory and feminist practice together and the results are often life changing. Indeed, some of our students have found employment through the doors that the internships have opened. Not all Gender and Women’s Studies students, however, are able to take this class because they must work for pay to support themselves through college and cannot afford to volunteer their labor to organizations that cannot pay. We are committed to helping interested students take this course, but we need alumni support to make it possible. Your monthly gift of $10 (or even an annual gift of $50) would help us underwrite the internships with scholarships for a few of our students.
- Promoting Undergraduate Research. Every year faculty members identify a few students who are doing path-breaking work that should be recognized by the larger Gender and Women’s Studies community. We would love to have funds to send a student or two to the statewide Gender and Women’s Studies conference or even the National Women’s Studies Association meeting. With enough $50 donations from alumni, we could make this happen.
- MA Student Funding. In 2005, the Department of Gender and Women’s began a Master’s Degree program. Since then we have graduated 56 MA students, who have studied a range of topics including children’s literature, international adoption, and NGOs in Tanzania. We are delighted by the quality of their scholarship and the range of their interests. Your gifts can help graduate students travel to conduct their research or present their research at a conference.
Donations to The Worcester/Whatley/Leavitt Fund
Remember when you discovered that childbirth could be scary and spiritual and empowering all at once? Remember when you realized how women’s bodies are affected by politics? Remember when you learned how harassment and discrimination affect the health of LGBTQ+ people? Remember when a college class helped you feel more comfortable with and aware of your body? Think about what those experiences meant to you. Many of you gained knowledge about bodies in classes you took with Mariamne Henken Whatley, Nancy Worcester, and Judith Walzer Leavitt. These professors formed the foundation of our department’s historical strengths in gender and women’s health. Upon their retirements, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies created a fund to honor the contributions of Whatley, Worcester, and Leavitt. That fund is used for the Worcester/Whatley/Leavitt Award, which is given annually to a graduate student at UW-Madison for their work in gender and health or health activism. By recognizing these students, we foster the next generation of faculty who will teach courses on gender and women’s health.
Read more about the careers of Judith Walzer Leavitt, Mariamne Henken Whatley, and Nancy Worcester.
To mail a donation to the fund, include the fund name and number designation (12547167 – Worcester/Whatley/Leavitt Fund) on your check, payable to the University of Wisconsin Foundation, and send it to:
UW Foundation
U.S. Bank Lockbox
P.O. Box 78807
Milwaukee, WI 53278-0807
To make a secure gift online using your credit card, please go to this website.
If you have questions or would like to talk about other giving opportunities, please contact Dr. Janet Hyde, Chair, Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, jshyde@wisc.edu.