It’s always good to know a little more about your professors and what led them to

teach, so I have decided to blog about the woman who inspired the Wahine Blog.

Jennifer Nelson grew up in Seattle, WA and attended Brown University for her BA and Rutgers University for her Ph.D. She majored in Modern, Culture and Media as an undergrad and studied a lot of feminist theory. Jennifer Nelson currently lives in Redlands, CA with her only son named Nicholas. She is a single parent and she says it can be tough, but she likes being able to support her son on her own as a feminist professor. She started calling herself a feminist in college and that’s when she had a group of friends that were involved with the women’s center and feminist politics on campus. There were some high profile rapes on her campus, so they organized students to become more educated on date rape. They held a speak out and also worked on body image issues. Along with those accomplishments, Nelson volunteered at Planned Parenthood. Nelson has a Ph.D. in US history, although her focus is women’s history. Her research is in women’s history, but she’s been teaching Women’s and Gender Studies courses since graduate school. Jennifer Nelson says, “ I like that these courses are interdisciplinary, not just history.” She taught high school in Brooklyn for one year, which convinced her that she wanted to teach college. Nelson says, “ I really like my job now, because it’s great to see young women (and men) discover that feminism is something they can embrace. I also like to enlighten students about what women have done in the past. Often students have had no women’s history and have no idea that a historical focus on women is even possible. When they start to focus on women’s history they see that the historical narrative they learned in high school can be told in a very different way.” One of her “That Takes Ovaries” moments was the year after college she and a group of friends hung a banner on the Statue of Liberty that said: “’Abortion is Health Care, Health Care is a Right.’”