Margaret A. Lourie Collection of Interviews about the History of Women's Studies at the University of Michigan 1970-1990
The interviews in this collection were collected by WGS Professor Abigail Stewart, with assistance from Zoe Boudart, in 2022-2024. Collecting these oral histories was inspired by a conversation with Dr. Margaret A. Lourie, the first director of the Women’s Studies Program in 1973-1975, and associate director throughout the 1980s, during the summer of 2022. That conversation was recorded on audio and is transcribed in this collection. In addition, 42 additional interviews were conducted with individuals who had been students, faculty and staff involved with those early years of the creation of the program, up to 1990.
We hope this collection will be valuable for WGS students and faculty, as well as other scholars, in examining different aspects of the early history of Women’s Studies (as it was called then). It is important to note that many additional materials (including copies of minutes of meetings, syllabi, documents submitted to the College, flyers, correspondence, etc.) are available for studying this history in the Women’s Studies collection, as well as in some other collections (e.g., CEW) at the Bentley Historical Library.
Find this collection in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies records.
Who was Margaret A. Lourie?
a biography by Abigail Stewart and Terry Wilfong
Margaret Lourie (universally called Peg) was the first director of the Women's Studies Program at University of Michigan from 1973 to 1975. Having arrived on campus in 1970 as an assistant professor of English Language and Literature, in 1972 and 1973, Peg worked with graduate and undergraduate students to establish the first official program at UM, and then became its first director. Later (1980), she returned to the program as its associate director, supporting many part-time faculty directors and teaching them about Women’s Studies and about the College. She was a central factor in the (second) governance model, stability and growth of Women's Studies throughout the 1980s, leaving only after we had our first two budgeted faculty, who she helped recruit, and had evolved a (third) new governance structure and relationship to LSA. Peg's daily presence in Women's Studies in those days made a huge difference to so many students and faculty, and without a doubt Peg's loyalty, commitment, scholarly judgment, and savvy were key factors in the successful establishment of Women's Studies at U-M.
After she left Women’s Studies, Peg worked as editor for nearly thirty years for the Kelsey Museum (as well as the Museum of Art and the Department of the History of Art). In addition to editing and formatting exhibition catalogues, exhibition text, the Newsletter, and other Kelsey Museum publications, Peg also edited the joint University of Michigan Museums Bulletin, as well as the journal Ars Orientalis, and for several years edited the Memoirs and Supplements of the American Acadmy in Rome. Peg was responsible for at least 25 Kelsey Museum books (probably several more), many books for other publishers, and numerous journal issues and newsletters, as well as text for well over 50 Kelsey Museum exhibitions, and countless promotional items and other texts for the museum. Peg retired from the Kelsey Museum inJanuary 2016, but she continued to do freelance editing until very close to her death.
Peg was an extraordinary editor, in part because she was careful to preserve each author's voice, while bringing the writing up to a very high standard. Peg gave equal attention to books, exhibition text, newsletter articles, promotional material, and the other texts she edited, juggling an array of authors, styles, and media with aplomb. And, although she was quick to dismiss her work in designing the books she edited (as she frequently did), she had extraordinary taste and style in book design--her books were both beautiful and readable.
Peg was born on June 30, 1944, to Betty Ann Miller and Eugene Joseph Lourie, and raised in Birmingham, Michigan. She had one brother, Thomas Clinton Lourie, who was four years younger. She received her BA from Wellesley College in 1966, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1972. An accomplished scholar, she published 3 books: the sole authored study, William Morris’ The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems (1981), and two edited collections with Nancy Faires Conklin, A Pluralistic Nation: The Language Issue in the Unitd States (1978), and A Host of Tongues: Language Communities in the United States (1983). She published original articles on William Morris (in Victorian Poetry) and Tennyson (in Studies in Romanticism) and co-edited a set of articles on women and memory for the Michigan Quarterly Review (1987) with Domna Stanton and Martha Vicinus; she also wrote the introduction (pp. 1-8). She died on August 28, 2022.
