Elaine Spencer

Elaine Spencer could be considered a founding mother of Portland State. She came to the shipyard campus of Vanport Extension School in 1952 to help build the Math Department. In 1958 she transferred to the Chemistry Department where she taught until retirement in 1984.

Born in 1919 in the Montavilla neighborhood in Portland, Professor Spencer’s father was a printer, her mother, a housewife. Elaine graduated from Linfield College with a major in chemistry and a minor in math. She went on to teach mathematics at the University of Maine, Orono, and received a master’s in organic chemistry at MIT in an era in which few women were allowed into any of its programs. At the end of WWII she married and moved back to Portland where she raised five children while teaching and earning a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oregon Medical School, with research on L-dopa.

For years Professor Spencer taught the introductory chemistry sequence. She was, according to John Mickelson, her long-time colleague with whom she co-authored a textbook on introducing chemistry to non-majors, a pleasure to work with and always kept an open door for students who will remember being taught by this friendly woman, wearing a print blouse tucked into her culottes or dirndl skirt.

In the 1970s, as a contributor to the development of women’s studies at PSU, Elaine Spencer pioneered the first Biochemistry of Women course in the country. In this time of experimentation and social change, she increasingly centered her research on questions of the similarities and differences in the biochemistry of women and men. She, along with another Walk Heroine, Professor Dawn Dressler in the Physics Department, gave early thought to what women could bring to science, which is acknowledged today as a legitimate field of study.

PSU alumna Karen Goens describes Spencer’s Biochemistry of Women class as “powerful.” Karen remembers her discovery that much of what she thought she knew about human biology came from studies on college males, because in those days they provided the experimental stock. Above all, Karen says, she learned from Elaine Spencer’s course to not always trust scientific “facts” unless one knows something about the assumptions that formed them. “Now that seems obvious, but it wasn’t so obvious in the mid 1970s. Elaine presented her class with eye opening information in a way that stays with me to this day." 

Professor Spencer was an early and strong advocate of faculty governance and worked tirelessly and effectively to bring a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Collective Bargaining to Portland State. In the 1980s Spencer was one of twenty-two female faculty involved in an Oregon-wide suit brought against the State System of Higher Education for discrimination in employment, pay, and promotion based on gender. Ultimately most provisions of the suit were dismissed in Federal Court, but as the late University historian Gordon Dodds writes in The College That Would Not Die, many of the plaintiffs “in time gained raises and promotions, and thus may have helped the overall struggle for equity for female faculty members.”

Elaine’s students recall her brilliance. The Biochemistry of Women course is still in the catalogue. Faculty who have benefited from her outspoken courage have much to be grateful for.