Cruikshank, Margaret

Margaret Cruikshank is an American lesbian feminist and academic, and a recipient of several Fulbright fellowships. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Cruikshank (B.A. The College of St. Scholastica; M.A. San Francisco State University; Ph.D Loyola University) has served as teaching faculty at Loyola, St. John's University, Minnesota State University and San Francisco State University. She is the author of several books on diverse topics, including lesbians teaching in higher education, lesbian literature and lesbians and aging.

Biography

A longtime lesbian activist and distinguished academic, Margaret Cruikshank (b. 1940) began her work in the 1970s at a time when lesbian studies barely existed and was one of the few lesbian academics in the U.S. to identify herself professionally as a lesbian. Her work has centered on raising awareness of lesbians within the academic profession and addressing the exclusion of lesbian literature and criticism from traditional canons and women's studies.

A native of northern Minnesota, Cruikshank came out as a lesbian in the Minneapolis lesbian-feminist community in the 1960s. She lived in the Midwest until 1977, when she moved to San Francisco. During the 1970s, Cruikshank played an active role in the explosion of lesbian feminist politics and culture and she began publishing on lesbian topics in 1975. Writing under her own name as well as various pseudonyms, Cruikshank has written numerous essays, articles and reviews that have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals including Gay Community News, Motheroot Journal, The Radical Teacher, Focus, Journal of Homosexuality and The Advocate.

With a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from Loyola University in Chicago, IL, Cruikshank began teaching English in 1969 at various colleges and universities in the Midwest. In 1975, she began teaching at Mankato State University (now called Minnesota State University, Mankato), which at that time, did not have a women's studies program. Cruikshank helped establish the first women's studies department at Mankato State University, for which she served as director between 1975 and 1977. Her experience arriving at Mankato State University in 1975 as a closeted academic and leaving the university in 1977 as an open lesbian in a university setting began a life-long commitment to increasing the visibility and solidarity of lesbians within the academic profession.

In 1977, Cruikshank moved to San Francisco where she worked as a resources director for a short-lived grassroots project, the Gay National Educational Switchboard, which provided a toll-free information line. In August 1980, Cruikshank became head of a small program in Continuing Education at the University of San Francisco (USF). Five months after she was hired at USF she was fired. Subsequently, Cruikshank taught in the English department at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) where she taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and worked with other CCSF faculty and administrators to incorporate lesbian and gay studies into the curriculum. These efforts resulted in the organization of CCSF's Castro/Valencia Campus and, in 1982, the appointment of Cruikshank as the first woman to teach CCSF's gay and lesbian literature course. Cruikshank taught an introductory women's studies course and lesbian and gay literature at CCSF for many years (1982-1996). She was also an affiliate scholar at the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University (1981-1988).

Cruikshank later taught courses on aging and women (1992 – 1997), in addition to gay and lesbian studies at CCSF, before moving to Maine in 1997. Cruikshank's introduction to working with older people came when she was did a graduate studies internship in gerontology at San Francisco State University, where she received an M.A. in gerontology in 1992.

Cruikshank has edited three major anthologies on lesbians: The Lesbian Path (1980, self-published; 1985, Grey Fox Press); Lesbian Studies, a women's history/lesbian studies text (1982, The Feminist Press) and New Lesbian Writing, a lesbian literature anthology (Grey Fox Press, 1984). In her papers, Cruikshank explains the three anthologies, their genesis and their inclusions. She traces their origins in the women's studies movement and through the lesbian academics' network created by the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and details the editorial process.

Cruikshank's correspondence and publications in the collection often discuss her experiences in teaching lesbian studies/women's studies and her life-long efforts to integrate lesbian and gay material into the college curriculum. Her correspondence in the collection also traces the networks of lesbian critics, academics and writers that were established through panels at the Modern Language Association's (MLA) and Gay Academic Union's (GAU) annual conventions, pioneering lesbian feminist periodicals of the 1970s, lesbian groups, women's studies programs, writing workshops, and women's publishing presses.

Cruikshank currently teaches women's studies at the University of Maine, where she is also affiliated with the Center on Aging (1997-present). She lives in a small fishing village on the eastern coast of Maine. Her most recent anthology, Fierce with Reality: an Anthology of Literature about Aging (1995, 2007) grew out of her master's thesis in gerontology at San Francisco State University. Her other books include Thomas Babington Macaulay (1978), The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (1992), and Learning to be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging (2003). She was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct seminars and lectures on women and aging at the University of Victoria Centre on Aging, in British Columbia, during the fall 2007 semester.

Chronology