Anita Watson - Excerpt 2 Transcript
(Reno, Nevada; August 15, 2001)

VC: Did you get a different view on things, since she didn't go through the - the college, she didn't get her degree, she didn't get a Ph.D., um, she did start, basically, the women's program, Women's Studies Program at UNR and you came through the History Department and, like you said earlier, looking at the same material but looking at it in a different way, was her slant - did that help you look at things differently?

AW: It did and it - it didn't. I - What --(AWatson2) Maybe the fact that she wasn't strictly an academic was useful, and I think it was particularly useful for her students, because she had a real life experience. Her understanding of women's history and the women's movement wasn't textbook. She had lived it, and that's clear with her sort of nineteen fifties, sixties lifestyle, you know, the supportive wife of the up-and-coming physician, raising her daughters, it's, you know, the June Cleaver approach to the life for a brief period of time, and then expanding beyond that and becoming more aware of what she wanted to accomplish and what she was going to have to change in order to accomplish it, so I think by having her involved in this it's really useful, (AWatson2) because in academia we - we do - and I would even say "we" because I don't consider myself necessarily an academic, but I think they tend to get caught up in the limits of their world, without really putting what they're understanding about the human condition and the past into the context of the real world, and I think Jean did that.