Margaret Cruikshank

Margaret Cruikshank
Born	1940 Duluth, Minnesota, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Educator Activist

Margaret Cruikshank is an American lesbian feminist and academic. Cruikshank began teaching in the 1970s and was one of the first American academics to be out during a time when gay rights was just a fledgling idea. Her research and educational work focuses on awareness and acceptance of lesbian academia and the exclusion of lesbian literature and criticism from traditional literature studies and women's studies. Her work has been published in Gay Community News, Radical Teacher, the Journal of Homosexuality and The Advocate.^[1]

Early life and career

Margaret Cruikshank was born in Duluth, Minnesota, where she attended The College of St. Scholastica, obtaining her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1962. In the early 1960s she came out as a lesbian within the Minneapolis lesbian-feminist community. She received her Ph.D in Victorian literature from Loyola University, writing her dissertation on Thomas B. Macaulay. Cruikshank taught English at Loyola, Central College and St. John's University. In 1975 she began teaching at Minnesota State University, establishing the first women's studies department at the university, serving as director. Upon her arrival at MSU she was closeted publicly as queer, and by her leave in 1977, to move to San Francisco, she was open to her colleagues.^[1]

Teaching career in San Francisco

Upon moving to San Francisco, Cruikshank worked as resource director for the short-lived Gay National Educational Switchboard; an organization that provided information through a toll-free telephone number. In August 1980 she became head of a small program of the Continuing Education department at the University of San Francisco, only to be fired five months later. She then went on to teach at the English department at the City College of San Francisco, teaching ESL and working with CCSF faculty to incorporate queer studies into curriculum. Her successful efforts inspired CCSF to open their Castro/Valencia Campus, and in 1982 Cruikshank was the first woman to teach the college's lesbian and gay literature class, which she taught until 1996. During the 1980s she also served as an affiliate scholar at the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University. From 1992-1997 she began teaching classes about women's gerontology, a topic that she studied during a graduate internship at San Francisco State University, where she received her Master of Arts in the topic in 1992. She continued to teach at CCSF until her move to Maine in 1997.^[1]

Current life

Cruikshank lives in a small fishing village on the eastern coast of Maine. She teaches women's studies at the University of Maine and is affiliated with the Center on Aging. In 1997 she donated a selection of her archives to the UCLA Library Special Collections. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, which, in 2007, sent her to the University of Victoria to lecture on women and aging at the university's Centre on Aging.^[1]

Further reading

• Cruikshank, Margaret. The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (Revolutionary Thought and Radical Movements). London: Routledge (1992). ISBN 0415906482
• Cruikshank, Margaret. Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture and Aging. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2009). ISBN 0742565947
• Cruikshank, Margaret. Lesbian Path. Bolinas: Grey Fox Press (2001). ISBN 0912516968
• Cruikshank, Margaret. The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-First Century. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY (1996). ISBN 1558611363
• Cruikshank, Margaret. Thomas Babington Macaulay. Boston: Twayne Pubs (1978). ISBN 0805766863

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} "Margaret Cruikshank papers (Collection Number 1847)". Department of Special Collections. Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. 2007. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt8199s2fb;query=;style=oac4;view=admin#bioghist-1.2.3. Retrieved 13 Aug 2011. 

Persondata
Name	Cruikshank, Margaret
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1940
Place of birth	Duluth, Minnesota, United States
Date of death
Place of death