Retiring anthropology Professor Karen Brodkin can remember sexism in the 1970s that triggered her interest into feminism.
As a graduate student in Michigan she said she experienced a contentious episode regarding a house purchase.
“I tried to buy a house in Detroit and I was told by the realtor there would be no way I would get a mortgage,” Brodkin said. “It used to be that women couldn’t get a mortgage.”
Only after threatening a lawsuit did she say the realtor relented.
Fueled by the house incident along with other cases of “male chauvinism” she became a rank-and-file member of the women’s movement of the 1970s.
Decades later, the retiring academic is being honored in a conference designed to celebrate her career while preserving her legacy for future generations, organizers said.
The event at Royce Hall is designed to highlight her breadth of research, delving into topics such as race, class and gender in terms of social structure and equality.
“We decided to (hold a conference as her retirement ceremony) because Karen’s work had a lot of impact in a lot of different areas of scholarship through academia,” said Cynthia Strathmann, who helped organize the event and who is one of Brodkin’s former students. “(Her work) had an impact when things were changing quickly and it seemed like a good idea to leverage that into something productive.”
Brodkin’s influential 1979 work “Sisters and Wives” is praised by her contemporaries for a multi-disciplinary approach. The doctorate dissertation incorporated the economic ideas of Karl Marx along with feminist studies for a critique on women’s status in societies.
She is considered to be one of the founders of feminist anthropology.
In 1987, Brodkin accepted a position at UCLA, the beginning of a 21-year relationship that spawned studies including “My Troubles Are Going To Have Trouble With Me” and “How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America.”
“The thought of working in a public university in an ethnically diverse city was very exciting,” Brodkin said. “It’s a terrific place, there’s a lot of opportunities to do different types of research. (UCLA) was far and away the most diverse school I interviewed for.”
And the diversity of Los Angeles has influenced her selection of study.
Since 1999, she has taken a closer look at grassroots activism in Los Angeles, including immigrant struggles and second-generation identities, she said.
Her study included people of Asian and Latino ancestry who shed stereotypes of traditionalism and female subordination.
“These activities redefined what it means to be a proper Korean or Mexican,” Brodkin said. “They recreated a sense of their own various ethnic identities that redefined gender roles.
Her influence is not without detractors who criticize her ideologies and teaching techniques.
She is featured on a Web site “Exposing UCLA’s radical professors,” created by former Daily Bruin columnist Andrew Jones.
Brodkin is one of “UCLA’s Dirty Thirty,” a ranking of radical professors according to the site, UCLAProfs.com.
The Web site rates Brodkin the 12th-most radical professor at UCLA.
Brodkin said the site was “a pretty pathetic attempt to smear people.”
The ceremony today, though, is a celebration by her supporters in recognition of her contributions to anthropology and feminism. Organizers say it’s a tribute to a woman who deserves to be recognized.
“I think it’s nice because she’s getting attention,” Strathmann said. “It’s a way to look at her legacy as something that would carry on in the future.”