Nancy M. Porter

Born in 1936, Nancy Porter was raised an only child in rural upstate New York by parents determined to provide her with the cultural and economic advantages lacking in their own upbringing. She recalls as a youngster being equally drawn to books and the natural world. She valued the freedom she had to explore fields, woodlots, and streams. Nancy remembers the fossilized sea creatures she found embedded in layers of shale, the disoriented woodchuck whose head she liberated from a rusty tin can, and the fox den she sat by waiting for kits to emerge.

Asked later in life why she hadn’t become a naturalist rather than a professor of English, she said: “I assumed that an interest in nature was something women pursued as an avocation. Like bird watching or gardening. The only female scientist I’d heard of was Marie Curie. Certainly, there wasn’t much encouragement for young girls to choose careers in science before the Women’s Movement. On the other hand, both teaching and observing nature require and repay knowledge of subject and habitat, patience, and caring about the ecological unit. In some ways, the classroom was my laboratory.

In the caring community of Oakwood Friends School, Nancy formed lifelong values and friendships. At Oakwood a beloved teacher and later in college her senior thesis advisor fostered a love of literature and challenged her to become a teacher-scholar.

For all her advantages Nancy struggled for years with feelings of invisibility in an era when society defined women’s achievements in terms of marriage and children and relatively few women were hired, tenured, and promoted in academic positions. Despite her marks of success in a male-dominated field, at times she felt profoundly alienated and at odds with her profession.

“What began to turn me around,” she says, “were the anti-Vietnam War and social justice movements of the 1960s, especially the feminist movement.” At PSU Nancy worked with students, faculty, and community women to create a grassroots women’s studies program, one of the first in the U.S. This program served as a model for faculty and students of other universities as they struggled to bring the new scholarship on women into the curricula.

Nancy believed strongly in a nonhierarchical and collaborative approach to program building and governance. She demonstrated this belief to a national forum in PSU’s collective contribution to the 1972 Feminist Press volume Female Studies VI: Closer to the Ground: Women’s Classes, Criticism, Programs. Building on this foundation she went on to publish articles and books on women’s studies and women’s literature. For ten years she edited Women’s Studies Quarterly, providing theory and teaching materials of relevance to women in such areas as law, economics, psychology, poverty, history, sexuality, and literature.

“On a personal level,” Nancy says, “as we discovered women whose writing never was mentioned in my undergraduate or graduate education, and as more and more of that writing became available through feminist presses, I found that the creative, competent, and intellectually curious person I associate with being a child flourished as a women’s studies teacher. Even more gloriously, my students also found they possessed resources and talents previously untapped or not encouraged. We were all in it together, learning from and teaching one another.”

Professor Porter was part of the educational reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and her classes were student-centered. Often setting aside the lecture model of teaching, she encouraged participation, developing novel ways of promoting interaction between readers and writers. Some students, she notes, might have wished for a more structured, less intuitive teaching style, but few would dispute her passionate desire that they take their educations seriously, find pleasure in learning, and realize their own powers in coming to think for themselves—to read, question, analyze, write, reflect, speak, and act responsibly in the world.

In later years she found satisfaction in working with students as coordinator of graduate programs in English. In retirement she put into practice what she had told generations of writing students—every life has a story—and wrote a memoir.

Written by Nancy Porter