Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Janet Moore Lindman.  She was born in Minneapolis and raised in a suburb called St. Louis Park.  Her father was a bricklayer, and her mother was a secretary.  She was the youngest of four children, with an older sister and two older brothers.  She attended public schools and graduated from Charles Lindbergh High School in 1976.  She entered St. Olaf College in the Fall of 1976 and began studying foreign languages.  She had studied French and Spanish in high school, and continued French as well as taking up  Norwegian at St. Olaf.  During her second year, she changed to become a double major in history and religion.  She had always liked history.  She was the one in her family asking to stop at historical markers and to visit local historic sites.  It was easy to add religion at St. Olaf as a second major because it was a Lutheran college that required all students to take some religion courses.  She had an interest in the women’s rights movement and feminism, but it was not until her senior year that she took a course in United States women’s history.  It was the first time that she had really been exposed to women’s history, and the idea of going to graduate school took shape.  However, she decided to work before applying to doctoral programs. She took a job at the University of Minnesota, working as a secretary for the Head of the Division of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health.  She remembers meeting the founder of the Division, Dr. Ancel Keys, the celebrated creator of “K-Rations,” on several occasions.  One of the key benefits of the job was that she could take graduate courses at the University for free.  After taking several, she committed to pursuing the doctorate.  She entered the graduate program in 1983.  During her first year, she continued to work part-time in her old job, but she received full funding in her second year through a Teaching Assistant position.  She worked with Sara Evans, the first women’s historian hired by the Department in 1976.  Even though Professor Evans focused on the 20^th century, she agreed to supervise Janet’s dissertation and co-advise her along with colonial historian Russell Menard.  She did many years of course work, even more than required, due to her desire to take advantage of the University’s growing expertise in quantitative methods through the mentorship of Steve Ruggles.  Rhys Isaac’s The Transformation of Virginia proved very influential to her work.  She greatly admired Isaac’s method, which was influenced by anthropology, another field that she had studied and also really enjoyed.  However, she was, as was so often the case at the time, disappointed by the book’s white male focus.  This reaction, combined with her desire to study religion, shaped her dissertation.  She completed her dissertation in 1993.  She took a one-year position and gained valuable teaching experience at the University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada.  The next year, Rowan College of New Jersey invited her to campus for an interview and then offered her the position.  She began in the Fall of 1994.

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When I was hired, there were only two other women on the faculty, Joy Wiltenburg and Corinne Blake.  They were also recent hires.  In fact, the faculty only numbered nine or so full-time tenure-track faculty members.  This was fewer than had been the case in the 1980s.  Rowan was a very different place when I was hired than it is now.  I taught four classes per semester, and I had no choice over the classes that first semester.  I had never taught two of the classes, so I was very busy preparing.  Joy was a very good mentor to me.  We shared similar interests in women’s history.  David Applebaum and his wife, Judy, were very supportive of me as well.  They often invited me to their home in Haddonfield for dinner.  We shared similar interests in politics, feminism, and academia.

In my second year, I took over as Coordinator of the Women’s Studies program.  In hindsight, this was not an ideal time for me to take on this role, as it slowed my research agenda.  However, research was not prioritized at the time. Some faculty members were active with research, but many were not.  There was little competition among faculty in applying for sabbatical leave, and there was little research funding available at the university.  The emphasis was on teaching above all else, along with service; research came third. Today, Rowan is a much different place, far more supportive of research, and a second-year faculty would not be given such an administrative burden.  Despite this, I was very proud of the work of Women’s Studies.  It was an important program for bringing like-minded faculty together from all across campus.  At the time, men constituted most of the faculty across the University, just as was the case in my department.  In addition to linking those of us with an interest in women’s rights and the study of women, we organized many events every year, especially during Women’s History Month.  We had some great speakers, often cooperating with African American Studies.  I did this position for ten years because I thought the work was very important, but it certainly helped that it also provided a reduction in the heavy teaching load.

I was also involved in two different grants to infuse more diversity into Rowan’s curriculum, especially in regard to gender and race.  I, along with Dr. Maria Tahamont and Dr. Virginia Brown, worked to integrate science into women’s studies courses and gender and women into science courses.  This three-year grant was sponsored through the Association of American Colleges and Universities.  The second grant was part of the New Jersey Campus Diversity Initiative sponsored by the Bildner Family Foundation in the early 2000s.  The purpose of this was to develop interdisciplinary courses on diversity and democracy for the First Year Experience.  Through continued funding, I, along with my colleagues. was able to offer curriculum development workshops over three years for faculty and staff to develop such courses. 

When I started, Rowan was still a college, not yet a university.  That change happened in 1997.  The local, even insular, nature of Rowan was still evident in many ways.  Many of our students commuted.  Many administrators, including our Dean, still very much emphasized teaching and service for tenure.  This became very clear to me when the Dean would not allow Joy Wiltenburg to accept two very prestigious fellowships to do research. The Dean reasoned that Joy should not be gone too long from her main job of teaching.  Such decisions led me to take on much service work in order to assure that I would be tenured.  However, my research naturally suffered, and it took me far longer than I would have liked to publish my first book. I did, however, quite enjoy some of my service work.  I met many great people through my role as a Senator.  I also am proud of my role in co-chairing the General Education revision.

One of the very best things about Rowan was the people.  The Department of History was very collegial, always a warm and welcoming place for me and my colleagues.  Even when faculty members disagreed with one another, those disagreements did not impact Department meetings or our general work.  I also greatly enjoyed working with faculty members in other Departments on campus, whether through Women’s and Gender Studies, as a result of my role as History Department chair, or via any of the numerous college, Senate and University committees upon which I served. 

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University. 

• Register for the Reunion on October 20^th:  rowan.edu/historyreunion2023.
• Link to Project 100 on the Web: https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/
• Link to Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/251485937221524. 
• Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions. Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.