space was available, a desk for the program was placed in the corner of one
parlor. As the program grew and regular offices were obtained in the building,
the parlors were officially designated for Women's Studies functions as well as
shared with other university units on request.

Physical space is a scarce and highly valued commodity on a university
campus. Access to the parlors enabled the Women's Studies Program to con-
duct activities and be visible. But the space was intricately interwoven with the
institution's many different stances toward women and education. The story of
building connections between the parlors and feminist scholarship weaves
throughout subsequent chapters. Yet long before we faced such considerations,
we confronted a more immediate challenge--benefiting from the power that
access to this space bestowed while making the space work for feminist goals.

Duke had never been an institution that forbade white women entry; it
spent the better part of a century defining the spaces that women should oc-
cupy within its walls. The parlors demonstrated wealth, prized delicate move-
ments, restricted interactions to stylized exchanges, displayed ornamental ob-
jects, required the labor of other women to clean and maintain them, idealized
past times as essentially good times, and claimed such spaces as the embodi-
ment of women. In the parlors we felt constrained to an idealized and abstract
model of womanhood in which women were more a part of the decoration
than of the action. How could Women's Studies occupy such spaces without
becoming limited by the ideas about women that such settings suggest?

We relegated the more fragile furniture to the corners. We recovered the
upholstered furniture with fabrics that could withstand the occasional drop of
coffee and running-shoe smudge. We arranged the furniture to facilitate con-
versation as opposed to display. Initially these minor adjustments helped; the
parlors become more livable.

Nothing, however, modified the gaze of the university's founding benefac-
tors, Washington Duke and his sons, James B. and Benjamin N. Their large oil
portraits looked down on our every discussion. Sometimes we joked with
them, bringing them into the conversations. Other times we ignored them,
hoping they had not heard the things we were saying. Often we wondered what
we could do about them. We knew the portraits would stay. The general
university community also used and admired the parlors. Many administra-
tors and former students wanted the parlors maintained; they valued the
portraits and the decor as important reminders of the university's history.
Removing the portraits was not a solution.

But the portraits continued to bother us. We were bothered by the absence
of female images in this space designated to talk about women's possibilities.
Where were the portraits of our institutional foremothers? Had the women of

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