By Natalie Naylor
Natalie Naylor is a fourth-year undergraduate studying English and Creative Writing. She has worked as a student editor for the Bancroft Library’s Oral History Center since July 2024 and also wrote “Berkeley SLATE-d for Back to School: Student Community in the Sixties.”
In 1870, the Regents of the University of California system voted to admit women on the same basis as men. Since then, female members of the faculty, staff, and student body have been inextricable from the University of California’s achievements and legacy. This Women’s History Month, the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library would like to highlight interviews from female faculty members who achieved historic “firsts” at the University of California, Berkeley. The four Professors featured in this blog post were interviewed as a part of the Oral History Center’s Education and University of California, African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley, and Women Political Leaders projects.
Herma Hill Kay was the second woman ever hired to UC Berkeley’s Law faculty in 1960, following the impending retirement of their first female professor, Barbara Armstrong. Kay taught at Berkeley Law for an astonishing fifty-seven years, during which the number of female faculty and students greatly increased as a direct result of her efforts. Germaine LaBerge, the interviewer for Kay’s oral history, recalls “Only fourteen women anywhere in the United States had become law professors before Professor Kay joined the faculty at Boalt Hall [now Berkeley Law].” In addition to her historic tenure, when Kay was “selected as Boalt’s first woman dean in 1992, she was adding to a long list of ‘firsts’ that, taken together, make an exceptional story” (pg. i).
Kay devoted her career to furthering the rights of women, specifically pursuing cases concerning sex-based discrimination and California marital property laws. As a result, Kay contributed to the conception of the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. In her oral history, she attributed her passion for women’s rights to a firm belief in legal equality for all: “I’ve always felt very strongly—and this came from my father—that women ought to be free and conscious actors. They ought to determine their own role in this world. So I was very opposed to anything that would stand in the way of their self-realization. I feel the same way about racial equality. There shouldn’t be any barriers placed in front of anybody to do what that person wants to do and is able to do.” (Kay 2005, pg. 76) In addition to her academic achievements, Kay played a pivotal role in forming both the Berkeley Faculty Women’s Club in 1969 and the Boalt Hall’s Women’s Association. She passed away at the age of eighty-two in 2017, but her legacy and impact on the law community at UC Berkeley remains evident to this day.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs began teaching at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare in 1979 and earned tenure as a full professor in 1986. Shortly after, in 1993, Gibbs earned an endowed appointment as the Zellerbach Family Fund Professor of Social Policy, Community Change and Practice—a position she held until her retirement in 2000. She became the first African American professor appointed to the position of endowed chair across the UC system. The Oral History Center interviewed Gibbs in 2003 and 2004 as a part of their African American Faculty and Senior Staff Oral History Project. Over the course of her career at the University, she contributed to several key dialogues in African American Studies. These included articles and books she wrote on “minority mental health, young Black men in America, and the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King cases” (pg. v). Gibbs also testified before the U.S. Congress concerning her research on young Black males.
Gibbs devoted her scholarly and personal pursuits to furthering justice and equality for several minority groups, which she detailed during her oral history: “So, this whole idea of all of the early influences which were around social justice from my family, my father and growing up in the church, have kind of really been a very, very deep influence on me in my work, coming back to that and looking at it in the last book that I did and even now things that I’m doing, the kinds of things I’m going to volunteer doing, it’s really coming back to civil rights, human rights, and women’s rights and how we can make our communities work better for minorities, poor people, the disadvantaged people and women. And that’s what I have done” (Gibbs 2010, pg. 424). Upon her retirement in late 2000, Gibbs earned the Berkeley Citation, the University’s highest honor awarded to individuals “whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.”
As the first woman tenured by the UC Berkeley Anthropology department, Laura Nader had an extensive impact on the University’s history and culture. She joined the faculty in 1960, the same year Herma Hill Kay started at Berkeley Law. Nader published ten books and around 290 other publications over the course of her career. As an influential and popular professor at UC Berkeley, she taught thousands of undergraduate students and supervised more than one-hundred PhD students. She recounted one of these popular classes in her oral history interview: “I puzzled because I never really understood why do students love the course Controlling Processes so much? Why do they remember it? Like the woman who said, ‘I took a course from you ten years ago.’ And I said, ‘You remember it?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it was Controlling Processes.’ Why do they remember it? They don’t remember any courses from one semester to another; who taught it and whatever it is. Their memories are worse than seventy-five year olds. So it opens their eyes to something. But why are our eyes closed? We’re not looking at reality in this country and many people are saying this now.” (Nader 2014, pg. 88)
Nader also taught at several other prestigious universities across the country, such as Yale Law, Harvard Law, and Stanford. Her research explored the interactions of law, anthropology, and energy science, specifically in indigenous Mexican cultures and the Middle East. Nader served as an ambassador for both the UC Berkeley community and the field of anthropology more broadly. As a result of her contributions to law and anthropology, she received the Law and Society Association’s 1995 Kalven prize for distinguished research. Experts across disciplines have commended her theoretical and ethical approaches to her research questions.
In the fall of 1976, Gloria Bowles taught the first cohort of students in the Women’s Studies department at UC Berkeley and served as its founding coordinator. She taught throughout the University of California system at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis for much of her career as a professor in Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies. She recalled, “In a sense, the women’s movement came to me through my students, because in one of those proposal meetings, they accepted my proposal for Comp Lit 40A, the undergraduate course. I had a wonderful group of women. Of course, these women were so excited to be reading women writers.” (Bowles 2021, page 16)
Bowles, like the other professors highlighted in this blog post, considered the Women’s Liberation Movement in conjunction with other Civil Rights movements taking place during the 20th century. “Feminist was not a word we used when we were undergraduates in Ann Arbor. I think we were more obsessed with civil rights. The women’s movement followed civil rights, and the Women’s Studies Program followed Ethnic Studies, and one movement came and another. I think probably thinking about civil rights causes you to think about your rights, or lack thereof—and of course, totally different, depending on your class and color. I think that I always thought about things like that, although I didn’t give them labels.” (Bowles 2021, page 17)
After her retirement from academia. Bowles established the Berkeley Women’s Studies Movement Archive at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Bowles influenced the Bay Area’s feminist culture and paved the way for generations of female scholars to come.
Conclusion
Herma Hill Kay, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Laura Nader, and Gloria Bowles all achieved historic milestones and paved the way for future generations of female students and faculty at UC Berkeley. Without their contributions, UC Berkeley would be drastically different from the community we know today. They are just four of the dozens of influential women faculty members that the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviewed. To find more fascinating oral histories like these, explore the Education and University of California and African American Faculty and Senior Administrators at Berkeley oral history projects. For additional information, explore the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley history project, which includes Oral Histories of Berkeley Women.
Read the full oral histories of these women:
Herma Hill Kay, “Herma Hill Kay: Professor, 1960-Present, and Dean, 1992-2000, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley,” interview by Germaine LaBerge in 2003, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, “Jewelle Taylor Gibbs,” interview by Leah McGarrigle in 2002, 2003 and 2004, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2010.
Laura Nader, “Laura Nader: A Life of Teaching, Investigation, Scholarship and Scope,” interview by Samuel Redman and Lisa Rubens in 2013, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.
Gloria Bowles, “Gloria Bowles: The Founding of Women’s Studies,” conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2021, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.
Additional Sources:
“Berkeley Citation | Berkeley Awards.” 2025. Berkeley.edu. 2025. https://awards.berkeley.edu/university-awards/berkeley-citation/.
“Iconic Professor and Former Berkeley Law Dean Herma Hill Kay Dies at 82.” 2022. UC Berkeley Law. March 24, 2022. https://www.law.berkeley.edu/article/iconic-professor-former-berkeley-law-dean-herma-hill-kay-dies-82/.
“Laura Nader | Anthropology.” Anthropology.berkeley.edu, anthropology.berkeley.edu/laura-nader.
“‘Something Has to Change’: Collection Explores Movement behind UC Berkeley’s Women’s Studies Program.” 2021. UC Berkeley Library. 2021. https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/womens-studies.
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