A new course brings a feminist perspective to the Batten curriculum

When Batten professor Lucy Bassett was seven years old, she became obsessed with watching a movie about women on strike. 

Every weekend, she would pop the VHS tape into the player and settle down with her friend in front of The Willmar 8, a documentary about a small but mighty group of women in Willmar, Minnesota. In temperatures as cold as 70 below, from 1977 to 1979, the Willmar eight marched, demanding equal pay and equal treatment to men at the bank where they worked. 

When she pictures herself back then, sitting rapt in her chilly living room and imagining how the women must have felt, Bassett often laughs. 

“Other kids were playing with their Barbies, and there I was watching an adult documentary about middle-aged women picketing and getting cold in front of a bank,” she said. 

But the weekend ritual marked an important beginning: the birth of her interest in feminist policy. 

The problems the Willmar Eight faced remain just as relevant to policy today. On average, women still earn only 82 cents for every dollar men make. When broken down according to race, the wage gap becomes even more stark, with Black women earning 62 cents and Hispanic women earning just 54 cents.

In 2018, decades after her Willmar Eight phase, with years of experience working for international organizations such as the World Bank and UNICEF behind her, Bassett joined the Batten faculty. And after three years of teaching at the School, she noticed something. 

The standard texts that Bassett and other faculty use for the Applied Policy Project course — and that she was using to teach Batten’s capstone master’s students — touched on equity, but “they didn’t take a deeper look at gender or race,” Bassett said.

From the time of her hire, Bassett had hoped to bring a feminist perspective into the classroom but felt unsure of the best way to do so. Now, she saw her chance. 

Bassett decided to develop a five-week single-credit course, Feminist Public Policy, which she offered to Batten graduate students for the first time this fall. The course covered feminist theory and practice, and it was also feminist by design, Bassett said: collaborative, non-hierarchical and far from traditional. 

During one class, Bassett brought in grocery bags full of magazines and asked students to make collages that reflected their definitions of feminism. Another day, the class engaged in a visual dialogue on the chalkboard, getting up to scribble layers of commentary beside each others’ contributions. Emma Karnes (MPP ’22) described the activity as invigoratingly “anti-hegemonic.”

“Rather than Professor Bassett standing in front of the class and talking to us, it allowed for the simultaneous expression of all of our voices, at once confirming and challenging each other on many different levels,” she said.

That dynamic was central to Bassett’s vision. She even asked students to contribute to the quiz, “so that they could pose questions to each other,” she said. “Some of their questions were the hardest ones.”

After she met the students, Bassett feared they might not have much to learn: many had studied sociology and gender as undergraduates. But she had designed the course to sit at the intersection between feminist theory and policy, and it was that overlap that transformed many students’ perspectives. 

For Karnes and Guada Pinto (MPP ’22), the shift happened while they worked on their comparative policy analysis, which focused on the aftermath of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation. During the Cold War, the U.S. government employed Navajo men in uranium mines without providing protective equipment or informing them of health risks. Pinto and Karnes analyzed the situation through both a feminist lens as well as a “gender-neutral” view. 

When they compared the two, the students were struck by the contrast. Their “regular” analysis led them to the policy that the government has enacted to right past wrongs: a lump sum of money for victim compensation, paid to Navajo men.

But a feminist analysis revealed that women — especially pregnant women and their babies — have been more negatively affected by uranium mining than men and that other policies might better benefit Navajo people.

“We drew the connection between the earth and women's bodies because especially for indigenous communities, you can't separate those two things,” Karnes said. “The health of one is the health of the other.” 

Pinto and Karnes recommended investing more in cleaning up abandoned mines, which continue to emit dangerous radiation. Based on a Marxist-Feminist analysis, they also suggested offering Navajo workers business education, low-interest loans and other opportunities to build economic sustainability.

It’s easy to think that feminism only benefits women, Bassett said. But as the analysis Pinto and Karnes conducted shows, “it doesn't have to be ‘us against them’ or ‘we're the powerful women trying to get our way,’” she said. “Feminist policymaking is good for everyone. “

Before she conducted the analysis, Pinto, who majored in gender studies, believed she could really only use a feminist lens in her individual approach to policy. 

“This class showed me that it's actually a very easy framework to incorporate in the policymaking process more broadly,” she said. “It's something that can be systematic, and it's something that everyone would be better off invoking in their policy.”

Sophie Mariam (MPP ’22) experienced a similar change in perspective. The class inspired her to spearhead a self-defense training program for women at Batten, and it also pushed her to think about policies that might have changed the experience of her own mother, who was forced to leave her job in Washington, D.C. when, after having children, her employer denied her request for a job-sharing option.

“I’ve always thought that as a woman who's interested in economic policy and labor policy, just breaking into the field itself is enough,” Mariam said. “Now I'm realizing that I need to think about how my work in policy will affect other women. That’s going to be critical if I want to accomplish the things that I'm aspiring to accomplish in my career.”

On the last day of the class, Bassett asked the students to share ideas for what might come next. Unanimously, they recommended that she offer the class for a full semester — and that equity be more thoroughly integrated into other Batten courses as well.  

Karnes hopes that more students will have the chance to take Bassett’s class in the future. In her view, being a policymaker and being a feminist involves asking the same question: “What kind of world do we want to see, and why?” she said.

The Willmar Eight never got the rights they demanded. But they achieved international recognition and influence — thousands of sympathy cards, cash donations, a feature in People magazine and, of course, the documentary that Bassett watched as a second-grader. Their strike is often celebrated as a victory for the women’s movement, even as so much work remains to be done.

“These are long struggles,” Bassett said. “Throughout history, people have been fighting for this.” In class, she reminded the students that they were “part of that legacy” and that “we have to continue the work — because these things take time.”