Mary Ellen S. Capek oral history interview, 2022.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection

Interviewee: Mary Ellen Capek, Editor, The Women's Thesaurus

Interviewers: Amanda Belantara

Date: July 26, 2022

Location: Virtual Interview; Corrales, New Mexico

Amanda Belantara: Today, we're interviewing Mary Ellen Capek, editor and coordinator of the "Women's Thesaurus" Task Force. The interview was conducted for the Ways of Knowing Oral History Project. The interview took place virtually on July 26th 2022, recorded locally by Hannah Crawford at Mary Ellen's home in Corrales, New Mexico. The interviewer is Amanda Belantara, based in New York City. So Mary Ellen, I'd like to start off today's interview by just learning a little bit more about your background and education?

Mary Ellen Capek: Oh my! Well, I started out with a PhD in Contemporary Poetry, and my first teaching job, because there were very few at the time, the year I finished, was in Newark, New Jersey, right after the riots, and a community college, Essex County College, had just formed the year before. So I was in a position as a newly-minted PhD, teaching poetry to mostly Black and Hispanic adults, many of whom had a very low level of education because of Newark Public Schools. And by the end of that time, with my teaching in Newark, which was an amazing experience, I learned a lot more than they did, I realized how much language influenced so much of their lives, and by being able to get them more confident in their own language and finding their language... This was also the era of Black language first starting to get acknowledged, and Spanglish was another version that we dealt with. I learned a lot about the power of language in people's lives. And I had studied some linguistics as a graduate student and was very interested in all of that. I went from there to Princeton, running the Continuing Education Program, which was crazymaking, in the sense that I dealt with organizational issues that were way beyond anything I'd never experienced before. And that process very quickly led me, for sanity reasons, to working with a group called the American Council on Education's National Identification Program for the Advancement of Women in Higher Education Administration, which we abbreviated as a ACENIP, and that program was really important to the Thesaurus, because we got some funding through somebody I had met at the Ford Foundation, through that project, and also Prudential Foundation, which is one of the supporters eventually of the Thesaurus, became a supporter because they really liked what we were trying to do. And a lot of that work led to my being included, because of the grant funding from Ford, into the coalition that first created the National Council for Research on Women. So all of that was a very circumlocutious world, but it led to my being part of the Council. I saw that as an incredible opportunity for doing something really important and necessary, this was 1980 and 1981, that we needed to, basically, pool together the existing centers for research on women, which many had been funded by Ford Foundation, and it was really a needed coalition, because there were policy folks and activist groups, as well as the basic research centers like Rutgers, Stanford, Wellesley, several at Harvard and Radcliffe, and those centers were putting out amazing research and all kinds of important policy analyses.

Belantara: You mentioned the Council, so I just wanna take a step back for a second, and could you tell us what the National Council for Research on Women was and how it was formed?

Capek: It merged with an International Center for Research on Women, I guess, about four or five years ago, but it kept going for a good 35 years. And basically, it was a coalition, initially, of centers that had been funded by the Ford Foundation.

Belantara: And when you say centers, could you elaborate? What type of centers?

Capek: Research centers. The Wellesley Center for Research on Women, Stanford Center for Research on Women, policy centers in Washington, Business and Professional Women's Foundation. A lot of these centers then joined together and started to find curiosity in each other. A lot of my interest in this from the get-go was working to bridge research, policy and practice, because as you might expect, the research centers were used to talking to other researchers, the policy centers preferred policy and the activists didn't much like any of them, other than other activists. I remember one of our very early meetings, one of the policy people hurled a bunch of three-by-five index cards into the audience and said, "Until you girls learn to put your research on these cards, forget about it!" So there was a lot of antipathy among the various perspectives. But it was important, because the vision there was really to transform how the world thought about women and girls. I mean, it was not that we lacked ambition. And we did work, from the very beginning, with some international centers, but mostly, it was a national coalition initially. And it's wonderful that it's ended up with the international coalitions, but initially, there was just a lot of interest in bringing together these centers so they could learn from each other. A lot of new ideas were really fomenting then, thinking race, gender and class, for example, not studying in isolation, in silos, but really trying to bridge into wider understanding. We even got... At least my vision, and a few other people, had the notion of trying to connect up using technology. That was way before, obviously, we had the Internet and email common. I was at Princeton, so I had access to ARPAnet and some of the other more current technologies. We had a connection to the educational testing service in Princeton, which donated email addresses to all of our center directors back then. I think we had 29, to answer your earlier question, in the beginning.

Belantara: 29 Members of the National Council for Research on Women?

Capek: And we went from 29, eventually we were close to 120, 130, I don't have the exact numbers in my head.

Belantara: Were you co-director of the Council?

Capek: No, I started out as executive secretary, which meant I took the minutes, which is one of the more powerful positions in any organization. I was very clear from the beginning that I wanted this bridging research, policy and practice. Not everybody was so enthusiastic about that. And because I got to take the minutes, whenever I got a chance, I would write in "Research, policy and practice." And sooner or later that mantra got it was quite comfortable for most people there, but it did become a really strong sense of possibility of bridging these gaps among us. One of the things, though, that was funny, that I think should be pointed out, was that this experiment we had with email, initially, was a complete bust. We started out giving everybody email addresses and encouraging them to share their ideas and thoughts, and nowadays, it just seems bizarre to think there were days when we couldn't do that. But it was amazing, because I learned two things from that experiment: That people had to have something to say, and they needed to say it regularly. They needed to log on every day, and for the most part, people didn't want to do that. So we put that on the shelf, waiting until the technology caught up with the folks in the centers, and it eventually did. But I also remembered a board meeting, standing up on a table at one point and throwing a phone book around in front of a microphone and said, "This, ladies, this is a database." Because there was a lot of fear of technology among a lot of those folks.

Belantara: So before, you mentioned a couple of these other organizations, and I just wanted to clarify, what was the relationship between the National Council for Research on Women, the Business and Professional Women's Foundation and the Women's Educational Equity Communications Network? And you weren't involved in all of them, but they all played a role in the Council, is that correct?

Capek: Well, the Business and Professional Women's Foundation was an organization that became a member center of the Council. And they were incredibly instrumental in getting this Thesaurus project off the ground. It wouldn't have happened without them. The librarian there was a force of nature. She was excellent. She's the one that first found Inter-America, which was the research group in DC. They were interested in getting their own collection online and accessible, which was their motivation for doing it. But there was a group, earlier in 1975, they had a meeting, I think it was at Wellesley, of bringing together maybe 15 or so centers, that, almost all of whom became members of the Council eventually, talking about the need for this, and nothing happened from it that I best know. It was an important meeting, it got the idea through to some people, but nothing really happened until the Council itself formed. The other group that you mentioned, I think was a product of a grant, some federal funding that was available. To the best of my knowledge, we didn't work closely with them. My memory, which, obviously this was a long time ago... My memory is that most of the people that had been involved in earlier iterations of these needs joined the work we were doing. And a lot of what my skillset was back then was collaboration, was getting different groups who really didn't much like working together to actually enjoy each other and do it. I mean, we used to have some wonderful annual meetings, because we would ask a lot of dumb questions, or I would, and it really got people thinking and out of their usual jargon from their disciplines. So we actually got people much more engaged. But it wasn't until we had... Oh, I guess it was like the second year of the Council, we had a meeting, we were sitting around talking, and one of the biggest problems that was identified was that these centers had all of this incredible, groundbreaking research of all kinds, and there was very little way to access it. Most of it would've been deemed by you librarians as ephemeral. A lot of it was published, or if it was published in more traditional journals, political science journals, law journals, social science journals, it wouldn't have been able to be accessed, because the language of those existing databases didn't contain any of the language that we needed to describe the work. We really looked at it and said, "This is a huge problem, and we have got to address it, and we got to address it with some imagination and curiosity." I don't think I was running the meeting, I think I was just a participant, and when I heard all of that, I just got so excited, because that was like my dream job. I was very influenced, as a graduate student, by Adrienne Rich. Her "Dream of a Common Language" was like, you know, lightning going off in my head when I read that book. It was like, "Here's somebody that understands we don't have words for the worlds that we're experiencing, for the life that we're trying to lead. We don't have language for it." And I love the title of this project, The Ways of Knowing, because that was, really, what we were up against. There weren't very many of them back then. And for me at least, this was an attempt, in a very prosaic way, to take Adrienne's "Dream of a Common Language" and put it into practice. And very quickly, we connected with the librarian groups. The ALA had a good working group that was very involved in all of this. They understood the issues, but they themselves hadn't had much of a chance. Because of their own work responsibilities, they didn't have the opportunity to pull it together, so that's something I knew how to do.

Belantara: Could you just, in your own words, tell us about the "Women's Thesaurus" and its goals?

Capek: Whoa! Well, the goals, initially, were to open up the existing thesauri out there, the databases that were clueless, that didn't even have language like domestic violence or sexual harassment in their thesauri. Another goal was to transform Library of Congress' subject headings and the other systems of cataloging that are out there. That's why I was so grateful for the librarians we had working with us. The three that were most closely involved, as part of the steering committee, were Pat King, from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, Sue Searing, who, at that point, was at the University of Wisconsin Women's Studies librarian and Sarah Pritchard, who was a Library of Congress librarian. And those three were amazing allies in all of this. They had the skillsets that I didn't. They could provide the technical knowledge. I didn't have a clue. I mean, I thought thesaurus, when we first started this, was Roget, right? That it was a technical term that was used to describe all these displays, the various alphabetical display, the hierarchical display, the rotated... I mean, I didn't have any idea what that was when we first started this. All I knew is that we had access to a lot of very important language. And to pull that together initially, we just grabbed lists of language from all the file cabinets in our centers.

Belantara: You explained in the introduction that the goal was to never replace the existing classification systems, but instead, to ensure compatibility with them. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?

Capek: We were very pragmatic, at least I was, and a lot of the people I was working with were, because what we were trying to do was transform the existing systems. Those systems were the ones used by most people, certainly in academia and in policy analysis and in activism. So you've got systems, especially in the traditional social sciences and natural sciences even, and literature. The goal was not to give them a whole new language. They would never have used it. These are mostly guys and they're mostly arrogant, and they're mostly convinced they have the handle around the world that they know and understand and articulate. And what we were trying to do, was say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa guys, wait a minute. We have a few other pieces of reality we want you to look at, and here are a couple: Domestic violence, sexual harassment..." Like that. I don't ever remember even conversations about doing this as our own unique system. It was always trying to transform the existing systems.

Belantara: You just were sort of talking about this right now, but I wondered if you could elaborate a little bit further, because in your article, "Wired Words," you wrote, "As a reference tool, the Thesaurus is designed to lead users into the language, to broaden awareness of other ways in which language structures are thinking."

Capek: Yes.

Belantara: Can you talk more about that?

Capek: I sure can. One of the things that just recently came to my knowledge was not just the Thesaurus, as the tool that we were just talking about, transforming the existing access sources, it was also giving centers a way of organizing their own filing that was compatible with other centers. So it was a way of making the language more mutually useful with each other. But it turns out, the Thesaurus is a mental health issue, you know? I'll give you the example that I just got hold of. Hilda Raz, who was one of three women editors of a national literary magazine, "The Prairie Schooner," received a copy of the Thesaurus as a review book. Well, in Hilda's case, she had said that this is not the kind of book they usually reviewed. They tended to review poetry, novels, short stories... Literature, basically. But she saw this and immediately claimed dibs on it, if you know that expression, "I got dibs on that." So okay, Hilda got dibs on that, and it went in her office, not outside. And she talked about it in graduate seminars, and the graduate students started being curious, coming into her office to use it. But Hilda said she used to use it because she would get very discouraged by all the sexism she was up against, and that she, one day, went into her office and shut the door and just started browsing. And she laughed and laughed and laughed. And she said ever since that one time, she did that regularly. Whenever she got depressed or overwhelmed, she would just go in and read it. And I just absolutely loved that story. I had no idea how people were using it.

Belantara: how did you first become interested or involved in working on the "Women's Thesaurus" Task Force? Can you remember who originally suggested the project?

Capek: I cannot. The group, it would've been, you know, pretty much the Council's board, it might well have been a board meeting. It was certainly a group of women directors of our centers who had identified the problem. I mean, period, the problem was not getting the materials and the resources out there so folks could use it. But I saw immediately in a much broader context, this was not just that, it was transforming the language. This was Adrienne Rich writ large. This was my chance to take Adrienne Rich and the poetry that I had loved, and actually, as homage to Rich, end up giving her a volume of our language. And I still get goosebumps and my eyes tear up sometimes when I think about that, because the damn thing came out thicker than Julia Childs at the time! And it was very much what we had hoped for, what I had hoped for, the first three or four years were simply iterations. We would pull like lists of the language from file cabinets, we would compile them. Cheryl Sloan, the librarian at the B & PW Foundation had Inter-America, I think, the group was, that she had found that would combine them, put them together and we'd send them back out.

Belantara: And so, before we go into that, I just wanted to back up for a moment. And so you were at a council meeting, and then this project came about and you decided this was your dream job, is what you just said a little while ago. So then, after you decided to take this on, how did the Task Force actually form and how were members selected? And then, a second part of that question would be how do you feel the group's composition, in terms of race, class, geographic location may have impacted the Thesaurus?

Capek: Good questions. I think what we basically did was to build off of volunteers. I mean, it wasn't like we went out and recruited people. I tried in a few cases, where I knew we didn't have the librarians we needed. I think I was the one that found Sarah Pritchard, but I'm not even sure of that.

Belantara: Were the volunteers all members of the Council, or how did you go about identifying potential volunteers?

Capek: Well, very early on, I think it might have been Pat King, who was the head of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. She might have put us in touch with the ALA Librarians Task Force on women's stuff, and once we hooked up with Sarah and with Sue Searing, it was smooth sailing from there, that they knew other librarians they could pull in. Everybody knew somebody that was interested in this project. So to the best of my knowledge, people pretty much volunteered for that Task Force.

Belantara: And can you remember roughly how many people were actually part of the Task Force?

Capek: I think it was about 20, maybe a little bit, a few more. I think we tried really hard to get as much representation as we could, certainly around race issues. We were trying that from the very beginning. And Council members went out of our way to make sure we had at least some balance of race on the board, the very first board we had. And I think we made a commitment, I know I did, and I think other people on the board made a similar commitment to doing that. And it was very important that we do that. Cheryl Sloan herself was Black, and she, very much, was instrumental in how we approached the first round of this stuff. I know, once we got into the subject groups, that was one of the mandates they were given, is that, "What is the language in your field, and make sure you reach out to a variety of different folks that care about this, not just your regular white gals." So we were pretty aware of all of that when we got started.

Belantara: And how frequently did the Task Force meet, and how would members correspond?

Capek: Good question. I don't remember. I mean, we didn't meet that often, and it was mostly phone interactions, mailing... I mean, I remember getting, from Cheryl, the first batch of integrated lists when we did the lists for the very first time from our centers. We pulled those together and we sent them back. So that would've been, you know, snail mail. It was like, you know, put the postage on and send it, and this is coming. And I remember having phone conversations... This would've been '82, '83, you know, there wasn't a lot of opportunity to do more than regular, old mail and telephone stuff. It seems like, you know, the Dark Ages, in retrospect.

Belantara: And so you've touched on this a little bit, but now I'm getting more into this part of our conversation, which is, so you've got the Task Force, you're coordinating everybody's work. Tell us about how this work actually got started. Where, when, and how did it happen and how did you go about coordinating the group and dividing the labor?

Capek: You know, that's a good question and I don't remember. I mean, what I remember, is that from the beginning, I was the one committed to making this happen, and I knew it was going to take a long time and I knew it was going to take a lot of collaboration. And I did know, by then, how to do collaboration because I'd run a statewide coalition network, that brought in as many different voices as possible, and it didn't unnerve me. I appreciated it and enjoyed it. So I was absolutely committed to making this whole thing take off. And I knew some of the initial work that had to happen, which was getting other people excited about it. And they were. It didn't take a lot to get people excited about it. What it took was patience, which is not my strong suit. And a lot of the time, it was just following up with phone calls, saying, "Did you get the second list yet? No, well, give me a deadline. When can you get it back to us?" So there was a little bit of nagging involved, I expect, but I'm not even sure... The word I used earlier was iteration, and that's really what it was. It was an iterative process. We must have gone back to everybody three or four or five times. And every time you did it, you thought of more and more and more and more words. So it was just like, it grew and it grew and it grew. It was like yeast! The whole thing expanded, and it kept expanding and it kept expanding. So you know, once we got closer to the fifth iteration of all of these lists, it was clear we had to do something to make it more manageable, because no one person, me included, could it wrap our heads around all of this as a draft. So late one night, I came home and I thought, "We have got to have subject groups." And it was this moment of power. I carved the universe into 11 groups , and it was so... I mean, I didn't do it by myself. I did a draft and then I sent it to everybody, and everybody else weighed in, and then, everybody else weighed in again. And it took a couple of iterations, but we did come up with a draft of 11 chunks that we slotted things into. We needed that for the Thesaurus itself because that has a subject display.

Belantara: You've got everybody onboard, you're the catalyst, so to speak, keeping everybody motivated. How did you secure funding for this project? You've mentioned already in the interview a couple of different sponsors like Ford Foundation, but how did your group actually solicit sponsorship from these corporations, and were the funders involved at all beyond providing financial support?

Capek: Not really. It wasn't that hard because other funders... I mean, we had the core funding from Ford, that was the coalition, our Council, that we really were a product of the Ford Foundation. Even as we added more centers that didn't have Ford funding, we still felt Ford was, you know, our daddy or mommy, as the case may be. But back then, at least, we got core support from Ford to keep us going. They really cared about trying to do this as a coalition not just as the Thesaurus, the project itself, of the Council, because they saw it as maximizing their own dollar.s With that kind of collaboration, the philanthropy was what philanthropy calls a multiplier effect. And so Ford was happy that we were doing this, but we also had core support that I had brought from Prudential that had funded my work in Princeton initially, and we got some core support from Lilly Foundation Those three were really the core. And then, there's a whole list of others in the... I can read them off if you want me to do that for the record, in the Thesaurus... Here, I actually marked it: Aetna Life and Casualty, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, Levi Strauss Foundation, Mobile, PerkinElmer Corporation, Prudential, Sears, Robuck, Sophia Fund, Tandy Corporation, Texas Philanthropic Foundation, the Xerox Foundation-

Belantara: That's amazing that the Council was able to garner support from all of those different organizations. Were you the one involved directly?

Capek: To some extent, yes. I could talk a good game. Very early on I learned to be a good fundraiser. Our president of the Council back then had been a program officer at the Ford Foundation, and she was very good at fundraising too, although she tended to mostly go back to Ford for the money. So it was much more me reaching out to a lot of different sources. And some of our member centers. I know Pat King from the Schlesinger, was really helpful with trying to get funding for that. The other librarians were as well. So we really got a lot of help from a lot of different people. Once this started to shape up, folks really saw the need for it and the use of it. And especially for foundations. My work after the Council was in philanthropy. I did another whole round of work as a researcher and consultant in philanthropy. And one of the things we know about foundations is that they like to see a lot of bang for their buck, and especially if it's safe. And in this case, the "Women's Thesaurus" was seen as an intellectual project, a project with immediate application, as well as safe, so to speak. And that may be putting the wrong cast on it for some folks, but it was a project that I think people appreciated and it wasn't that hard to raise money for it, quite frankly, which it's still... And the Council itself ended up donating at least a year of my time. I think it was halftime. And then, eventually, toward the end when we were doing editing full-time, I got a sabbatical of six months to do the editing.

Belantara: What were some of the learning curves for you, both individually and for the group, and when you decided to take this project on, what were some of your first steps?

Capek: Well, as I said earlier, for me it was an incredible opportunity. If I could have designed my dream job, this would've been it. Because A, it's working with language, which I love. B, it's a philosophical and political issue for me, trying to find language to describe the worlds that we experience. And as I said earlier, Adrienne Rich and some of the other poets, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, others... Well, Mary Daly's not a poet, but some of her work certainly spoke to the need to come up with a different frame of reference than what we were stuck with, with this, you know, white male stream of language. And what I had learned in Newark was how important language was in isolating people. You could create ghettos simply by not allowing folks into the access of the language that they used, so... In fact, I'm in the middle of writing my last book, called "The Power of Naming," because this is a whole project that has stuck with me like glue through the whole of my life, since I've been thinking about it. It's essential how much language needs to be opened up. So I saw this from the get-go as something that was hugely important, not just to me, but to scholarship in general, to the political world in general and eventually, to women's lives. And I think pretty much everybody on that Task Force shared a similar vision. I didn't need to explain it. Everybody got it.

Belantara: These are all really inspiring ideas, and it sounds like you were highly motivated and connected to this topic, but from a practical perspective, what did you do, when you just said, "Okay, I've agreed to take on this project. What do I do now?" What were some of the first things that you did?

Capek: Very first thing was getting our centers to share their file headings. I mean, it sounds simplistic, but it was essential, because they were the source of the language we wanted to get hold of.

Belantara: Your article mentions that terms from 35 research centers, libraries, publishers and associations were collected to help inform the Thesaurus. So how did you identify and select these, and then how did they extract and then provide their list to the Task Force?

Capek: It's pretty straightforward. I mean, it sounds absurdly simple, but simply going through file cabinets, literally pull out the drawers from A to E, and write down the subject headings of the files.

Belantara: But you have 35 research centers and so each center, somebody working there is opening all of their file drawers, taking note of every single heading?

Capek: Yep.

Belantara: Can you describe, like, just step by step, what it would look like in order to get that to you?

Capek: Well, I'm sure they put it in a computer. We did have computers back then. I started out, I wasn't going to do this work, I said, unless I got my, you know, back then it was an IBM PC, and so we did have computers. Most of the centers had at least one computer, and I'm sure they would've typed all of this into the computer, printed them out, mailed it to me. And then we, in turn, sent those to Washington, where Cheryl submitted them to Inter-America, which merged the lists. They were a research organization. I don't know to the extent they were a library-based organization, but they were definitely a research and development group, and they had enough computer capacity to take those individual lists. I mean, this was before we really had fancy spreadsheets. I mean, nowadays you'd just pull them into, you know, either a Word file or a spreadsheet, and interlink them, but you couldn't do that back then. Cheryl would get that group to produce the linked files and then we'd send it back again. That's where the iterative process started. I mean, it's really very boring in some ways.

Belantara: It's exciting to me to hear all this collective effort that is behind the Thesaurus.

Capek: Well, and once you got those lists, what was so interesting was that it would spark more words. I'm sure, I don't remember specifically, but I'm sure the second or third iteration of those lists going back to the centers that had contributed in the first place, they would think, "Oh yeah, that reminds me. There's this, and there's this word and there's this word." So it, basically, was a trigger for adding more language to those lists. And that's really how the whole thing got built, initially.

Belantara: And so there were 35 places that you gathered the headings from. How did you identify, because I imagine there may have been more than 35 around the country at the time. Did you actually have different centers that you definitely wanted to include specifically? Or any whose terms kind of stood out, and maybe had a predominant impact on the Task Force's work?

Capek: What I remember about that is that initially, we went with any of the member centers that wanted to be part of this. We gave everybody the option of joining this, or at least of submitting their language. And you know, a few didn't, but you know, I think we had a pretty good representation just from the Council member centers.

Belantara: You already talked a little bit about combining these lists, you went with the company. Could you talk a little bit more about the process then?

Capek: You know, it's interesting, because I don't have access to the archives anymore. I was sort of kicking myself. I would love to have poked around back there. They're all at the Schlesinger Library, up at Radcliffe, the archives. And it would be fascinating to be able to go back and plow through some of that. But as best I recall, what we did was just really keep this back and forth going.

Belantara: And the back and forth, that's all snail mail, is that right?

Capek: Yes. All snail, yes, right.

Belantara: So how thick was the initial combined list? And you would send that same list out to each person on the Task Force? And then, would you talk like on a conference call to get everybody's input? Or would you, as coordinator, talk to each person or each group?

Capek: I don't remember specifically with that. I think, pretty much, what we did was ask people to go through the list and add stuff that was missing. And then, we took those combined lists and got still another clean printout. But it was when we switched to the subject groups, that's what really made the difference, and made it much easier and much, I shouldn't say easier, made it much more in-depth, because once people could get into their own areas, we could then divide some of the responsibility. We assigned each person... Each of the subject groups had a person who was in charge, and they took responsibility for reaching out to others in the subject group, as well as others that weren't, to take their language and say, "Okay, which of these terms on this combined list belong in our subject group and which ones are missing?" So once we started pulling those into subject groups, holes emerged, and we saw more clearly where we needed to add more expertise or add more words, add more expertise so we could add more words, and it just sort of grew from there. Yeah.

Belantara: And so are these the 11 categories then that eventually structured the Thesaurus that you're talking about?

Capek: Yes.

Belantara: The subject specialties. Let's go back to that moment that you shared a bit earlier, where you said that you had this revelatory moment where you got to divide the universe. So how did you actually make that decision initially, and then, how did you decide upon each of the 11 categories?

Capek: It was me sitting down at night thinking we've got to carve this up so it's manageable. What are the most salient groups that make sense for both the research that we've got in our centers and for the reality of the universe we're working in. And so I just pulled them together. I mean, it wasn't rocket science, it was just sitting down and saying, "How do we divide it up?" It's not complicated, it really is not. And it surprised me how easy it was to become a commander of the universe before you even started.

Belantara: So was it your executive decision, or was that something that the Task Force decided collectively? You came up with all the categories, is that correct?

Capek: I did initially, but then, the way we were working was very collaborative, so I sent them around to everybody again. "So hey, guys, look, this is what I came up with late last night with a stiff bourbon. What are you doing about this? Do you agree? Are there things I've missed? Does this captured the universe that we try to capture?" You know, what's missing? And you know, I don't remember how much change they actually made. There wasn't a lot. They maybe combined a few, renamed a few, like history and social change, I remember, that got refined. Government law, Government, Public policy, they combined those together. I think I had Law separately at one point. So stuff like that.

Belantara: And so what do you think about these categories today?

Capek: You know, I don't really think much about them. I think they still work. There would be more focus, maybe trying to put within each category, race, class, and gender, make that more specific. But these really are sort of the basic spread of knowledge in the way most groupings work. I mean, we're dealing more, not with academia per se, because we were trying to bring in policy and activism, but you know, we don't have research here, we don't have... Science and technology would include engineering, for example. That wasn't made specific back then. So there's gaps. Again, one of the things I always knew as a linguistic student in graduate school, and it's certainly proven true over the years, is language is a living, organic entity. It's not something that's ever fixed. And what we were trying to do with the Thesaurus project was basically doing a fix in time. Trying to say, "Okay, here's a snapshot. In 1987, this is what our world as women researchers, policy specialists and activists looks like. These are the words that describe our world in 1987." And we had hoped that there would be more editions of this. I certainly wasn't in a position to do that after a bit. This was sort of my big thing, and somebody else needed to run with it. I think it was the Netherlands did their own version of this maybe eight or nine years later. So it did get replicated in some ways, and used as a basis for other editions, but once the technology started getting so sophisticated, once we got the Internet and once we got full-text searching and all of the search capabilities that were possible, are possible, it's something that's much less needed, because people can pluck out of either Google or their own interest, and find a language term in any piece of research published, or in an piece of media that's put out there even. So it's a much less needed thing, because this was clearly the era before full-text searching. I mean, back then, all of the documents, especially research and policy documents, anything was available only with the existing thesauri, and they shut out all the rest of us that didn't fit.

Belantara: And so you mentioned that you would share lists, you shared the categories, initially, when you came up with them and you would get feedback. So you know, as you just mentioned, language is a living thing, people have different ideas. So how would you handle disagreements about terminology when you were creating the Thesaurus?

Capek: Mostly with a sense of humor. We didn't get into any knockdown, drag out fights about any of this, at least, that's my recollection. I did, to some extent, with Cheryl, my colleague in the Business and Professional Women's Foundation, because she wanted this as a very precise thesaurus, and I saw this as a much more living document. The example I tried to give her at the time was circumcision, and if you do a traditional breakdown of Circumcision, it's Male circumcision and Female circumcision, and male and female circumcision under circumcision, which is under surgical procedures, that completely and utterly distorts female circumcision, which is, essentially, violence against women, in my opinion. So how do you do that? You have to break it apart. You have to be more creative. You have to be willing to say, "We're not going to do a traditional volume here. We're going to really bust things open. We're going to bust things open and make it work for how we have to make it work." And that's a lot of what we were trying to do. Or at least that's what my vision for it was. And I think most of the Task Force shared that. Once we decided we were really out to bust up the traditional hierarchies, not just, white male hierarchies, we were out there to bust up the traditional hierarchies in language, and how the traditional librarian documents the traditional thesauri would have forced us to arrange them. I mean, excuse my language, but it was essentially, "Fuck that!" There was no way I was going to put in all of my time and energy just to create and replicate the male hierarchy. And so that's really what the vision of this was. We were groundbreaking and by golly, we were going to show it.

Belantara: Tell us about the work that was involved in creating all of the different displays. So you have the alphabetical, the hierarchical, the rotated and delimiter displays. What kind of work was involved in creating each of those?

Capek: It wasn't much work. Those were traditional categories of a formal thesaurus, and they were tools that was the structural tools that made the whole thing beautiful and work beautifully. And we got really lucky with our design team at Harper and Row, because they were able to take these categories and use the design skills to make them much more usable, I think. And I mean, I didn't have a clue what those were initially. Like I said earlier, Roget was my understanding of a thesaurus, but once we put all this together, coming at this with so many different angles of interaction was really fascinating. Seeing the language from different angles of vision was just really interesting to me.

Belantara: What role do you think race and class difference played in the creation of the Thesaurus? How did you think about incorporating cultural differences in the selected terminology?

Capek: People were very tuned into that. I mean, a number of our centers had come up with ways of doing research bridging race, class, and gender, which is now standard jargon, but back then, that was a whole new area to even think about. That got mentioned the very first meeting of the Council we ever had, and it was very much a priority, to look at all those different dimensions. So it was in everybody's mind, I think, when they were doing the work. And once we broke up into subject areas, it was much easier to take responsibility for that and make sure everybody had at least some sense of getting input from a broad range of certainly race, class not so much, and obviously gender is key to the whole thing, but you know, it was definitely on most people's minds.

Belantara: Many terms in the Thesaurus are actually culturally specific. For example, in the Thesaurus, there's the terms, and I could be pronouncing these incorrectly, but there's a listing for Mikiri, Mikveh for example. How did the Task Force choose which cultural terms would be represented in the Thesaurus?

Capek: Oh, that was really up to each subject group. Yeah, well, it's what people shared with us from the subject groups. They really had the input on that. And what we tried to do was use the related terms, wherever possible, to link to those, so that would give more definition. We obviously weren't writing a dictionary, so there aren't definitions there, but this is right about the time Cheris Kramarae and her colleagues were doing the "Feminist Dictionary," which came out, and they were paired together as a really important resource, that some of the same terms would be in both of those, as tools for people to use.

Belantara: And tell us about any new terms that were introduced via the Thesaurus. Could you tell us about any terms that were particularly meaningful to you personally, or to the communities you were working with?

Capek: There wasn't a lot that was new. The one I remember, that I did hadn't known earlier, was Contact dyke. That was a joke for a lot of us, because what does that mean? Well, that means, you know, the lesbian in the community that you go to if you want to find out who else is doing what. So, somebody who knows, and there's usually at least one in every neighborhood. That kind of thing was... some of it was slang. We tried not to, just as sort of as a general rule, of not getting into a lot of slang that would be quickly out of date. I mean, we were assuming this would last for maybe five years or so, the Thesaurus as relevant, and then, it would quickly become outdated. I'm not sure how outdated it is. I would've added... The one group that I think, in retrospect, we didn't include enough of, was Native Americans. Because I'm very close friends with a Native American artist out here, and I gave her a copy of this, and I was aware, as I was giving it to her that I was proud of it and I wanted her to see what the work was, but that it was done in 1987, and a lot of us were then pretty clueless about Native American culture. Still are, I mean, even here in New Mexico, it's amazing what little knowledge gets dispensed in the schools about all of that. And I've been doing other volunteer work to try to change some of that, but it's really, that's just one example where it's... you know, it's a flawed document. We did the best we could with all the resources we had at the time and the money and the energy we had to do it. And you know, nobody is ever going to say, "This is the final, authoritative list." There is no such thing as an authoritative list. I see authoritative list and I want to say, "No, no authority!" But that's neither... That's more me than what this was. So you know, I had to tone it down a little bit.

Belantara: Did Hana have something to say there?

Hana Crawford [sound recordist]: I'm going to keep it running, but I'm, you know, eavesdropping today and I was wondering about sex work?

Capek: About-

Crawford: Sex work?

Capek: Yeah, it's there. Yeah. Did you hear her?

Belantara: Yeah.

Capek: She said sex work.

Belantara: Yeah, sex work is in the Thesaurus. Is that what you said, Mary Ellen?

Capek: Yeah, I think so. Let me look it up. We have Sex tourism, sex work per se, no. Sex tourism, Sex stereotypes, Sex selection, Segregation, Roles, Stereotyping, Reversal, Ratio, Pre-selection, Sex objects, Sex manuals, Sex industry, Sex hormones, Sex equity... Let's see what prostitution yields us. Prostitution, right across from Provost. "Prostitutes, link under related terms, Camp followers, Concubinage, Courtesans, Geishas, Harlots, Johns, Pimps, Sex tourism, Sexual exploitation, Sexually transmitted disease. So Prostitution, Brothels--Economic value of women's work, Female sexual slavery, Massage parlors, Organized crimes, Sex tourism, Sexual exploitation, Sexually transmitted diseases, State regulations, Tricks, Violence against women... So you know, it's not complete, but we caught a lot of it.

Belantara: And so just a moment ago, you were saying there is no finalized list, right? But-

Capek: We would add sex work.

Belantara: But at the same time, you had to finalize this iteration of this project. So you mentioned before that there was something going on with when you were coming up upon the final edits. So once you did begin to finalize your word lists and decide on the structure, what was the next step, and what were you thinking during the final editing stage?

Capek: Well, it was absolutely an amazing experience, and it was pretty much the last year. I was doing both the coordination still, but it had been... You know, everybody was working well together at that point, so it was mostly keeping everybody the loop. But I was also trying to get a publisher, at the same time I as editing this thing, and we went through two publishers before we finally got to Harper and Row. And that's a story that's worth telling, because we first went... I don't remember, I've suppressed the name of the first publisher. They were very interested, they wanted to do it. They were a library publisher, but they finally decided not to, because we were breaking down authority lists. We were a little too radical for their tastes. Oxford University Press almost gave us a contract. In the final analysis, they decided, same thing, we were just a little too, you know, not normal. And somebody, I don't even remember who it was, got a blurb into this magazine, and an editor at Harper and Row named Janet Goldstein called me and she said, "Do you have a publisher yet for this document?" And I said, "Nope, why, are you interested?" And she said, "We are!" And that's history. She was amazing. Totally, she totally got what we were trying to do. So did the designers, so did the editors. It was a cheering squad of people that we worked with at Harper and Row. They were absolutely wonderful, and that's what made the whole thing work. I don't remember where, in the sequence of things, that we got that contract. It was probably when I was partially through the final editing of it. We were going to go ahead and do the editing regardless, whether we had a publisher on hand, a traditional publisher, or not. I mean, we would've published it ourselves if we had to. Because we already, by then, had done a couple of reports that we self-published. But Harper and Row's design made the whole difference, for me at least, in the presentation of this and how it was so beautifully understood. It's accessible, in a way that it otherwise wouldn't have been. And the other in-kind contribution we got, this was just total luck, found a company called Advanced Data Management that was in a town called Kingston, which is right next to Princeton, and they were able to hook me up from Princeton, where I was living at the time, with a direct connection into their mainframe systems. And they were the ones that designed the software to manage the whole thing, including all the displays. So the editing that I got to do was using the screens they set up for me with each of the rotated displays. And it was just totally amazing that we had that connection and that opportunity. And that's pretty much all I did for six months. I had long hair, like yours, at the time, and I would feel like I would put my head down and words would come tumbling out of my curly locks. It was so funny. And it was constant. I mean, it was total immersion, because it was having to do both the hierarchies and the related terms. I mean, those were the two biggies, narrower term, broader terms, related terms. And using those tools to create the kinds of connections and pull apart the other things, like circumcision for example, that I was describing. And you know, let me just show you, give the example of that. I'll look it up, female circumcision, instead of laying it out like that, Female circumcision, the subject group is Natural sciences and health, narrower terms are Clitoridectomy and Vulvectomy, related terms are Castration, Chastity belts, Clitoris, Genital mutilation, Infibrillation, Initiation rites, and Tribal customs. So that was what we ended up with, pulling that apart. Otherwise, it would've probably still be in Natural sciences and health. Although, Male circumcision isn't really a... maybe that shouldn't be, technically, under sciences and health, because that's a religious practice most of the time. Let me just see here. It's under both Natural sciences and health and Social sciences and culture. Surgical procedures, Penis and rites are the related terms. So there are two entirely different frameworks for that.

Belantara: So you were doing all of this editing with the computer that the company set up for you?

Capek: I sat in my office at home in Princeton, and they had set up, I guess it must have been a modem, it would have to have been a modem, you know, the old kind that you put the phone in, or something like that. The old-fashioned modems, it would've been 1985, 1986, so whatever modem was current back in '85 and '86, and I could dial into their mainframe. They were wonderfully supportive. They kept rolling their eyes, they thought the project was hilarious. The Word Lady, as they called me. These are the hotshot tech guys that are used to much duller stuff, and we were the ladies talking about things like, you know, date rape and female clitoridectomies, right? So it's a whole different world for these guys. They had never seen it before, but they were wonderfully helpful.

Belantara: So you're sitting there, you're doing all of the final edits. At this point, you were already kind of committed to what you had decided would be the finished thesaurus, or were you still like making some final changes at the end once you were there hooked up?

Capek: Oh, final changes all the way through it. Yeah, and it was easy to do. I mean, once we pretty much had the text, I don't remember the process... we may have done one of the displays, like the alphabetical display, and sent that to everybody on the committee and in the subject groups, and then, gotten their feedback from it. Say, "Go through this with a fine-tooth comb. If there's anything you disagree with, let me know now, we could change it. It's not written stone yet." Even to the very end of this, we tried to keep an iterative process going.

Belantara: This is prior to actually publishing it, but how did you decide that it was ready for publication when it's a never-ending process? How did you finally say, "It's time?" How did you make that decision?

Capek: Well, it was obvious that we had to stop at some point because the money, certainly for my time, was not going to keep going. I had a lot of other things on my plate I had a turn to that I had put aside for this editing stuff. So I had six months, I think that was what it was. And I did what I could in that time. And I had a sense we were pretty close to completion. You can tell that you're almost ready, when there aren't a lot of suggestions for changes. And there was a point at which I think people said, "Okay, this is as good as this going to get for now, write the introduction and let's just get it off our desks."

Belantara: And so when did the Library of Congress add the "Women's Thesaurus" to its official MARC Code List of thesauri, and were you consulted about this or asked before they added it?

Capek: I don't honestly remember. That's a question for Sarah Pritchard. She's the one that pulled that off. She's the one that was there at the Library of Congress. She was one of my main touchstones for suggestions and feedback, and I'm sure she took it and ran with it as far and as fast as she could go. I don't remember the timing of it. It probably was within a year or two that we had... I mean, within the first year we got wonderful reviews. It won awards, it got... Everybody was knocked over. "This was such an important project," "We loved what you did." "Yada, yada, yada yada." It hit the stands and really made a good impression. So wherever possible, people were trying to take it seriously. It helped that Harper and Row published it. It helped that we had Harvard, Wellesley, Stanford, Rutgers, University of Tennessee, University of Texas. We had all of the major universities on our plate working with us. So I mean, we were an impressive-looking group, and people had to take us seriously, and they did.

Belantara: And so how do you feel that it was added to the official list?

Capek: Wonderful. That's something I brag on all the time, that in retrospect, you know, it's interesting, because you get to be 80 years old, which I turned in December, one of the things you do is look back and think, "Okay, what's this all been about? What have I understood? What have I done? What do I still need to do?" All of that. A very retrospective thinking. And in retrospect, the Thesaurus is really the centerpiece of what I've done. It's the thing I'm proudest of, I think it's the thing, in the long run, that's probably made the most difference, and it's just something I really am grateful for having had the opportunity to do. I mean, I always struggle, between wanting to be more of a poet, a writer, and I do a lot of that, but my basic instinct is toward change. Trying to make change happen, however I can, wherever I can. And that thesaurus was one of those documents that kind of combined both of those areas that mean so much to me. And I mean, how good is that? It was just amazing to have had that opportunity. And you know, the Council used that. It gave the Council credibility. That was also another piece of the puzzle for us, as we were starting to create this coalition. We needed something that would kick it off, that says, "Wow, we do know what we're doing." And that really helped because the reviews were so good. We got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of different places, helped us get better funding as we moved along.

Belantara: And so you've mentioned that you had really positive reviews. In addition to that, do you know if the "Women's Thesaurus" was put into use by different libraries or other organizations?

Capek: Yeah, it was used in a lot of different places. I can't recount, I don't have lists of those, but I do know from a lot of people that it was used for, you know, predominantly cataloging, for cleaning up, once we got it into the Library of Congress, in the MARC system, you know, a lot of that just happened. So it wasn't even needing to be a choice on people's part. But no, and women's studies programs... I didn't get a hold of Hilda's example until just recently. And I just absolutely love it, because I used to do the same thing even after it was edited. After all that editing I did, you know, 10 years after the fact, I'd sit down and open up a page and read it. We even had a dramatic reading of the section, "Images of Women" at one of our board meetings. It was absolutely hilarious. We'd all had a little bit of wine by then. But our then-board chair, Catherine Stimson, who was just hilarious, very dramatic, she went on to become one of the MacArthur Foundation's people within the foundation that awarded the Genius Grants, she ended up just doing this dramatic reading of "Images of Women," and we were all hysterical by the end of it, it was so funny. So you could just go in, open it and you know, open a page and you know, get inspired or laugh. A mental health break is really what we were trying for there. You know, in retrospect, that's one of the things I'm trying to write about now. You don't, as women, even in our era now, we still live in a world where we don't see ourselves reflected, even if we're white, upper middle-class women with a lot of privilege. We don't see ourselves reflected back very often, and it goes on and on and on. And one of the things Hilda said was that it felt like, to her, it connected her to a community of like-minded women that she felt were working on the same concerns and same language and same issues.

Belantara: And so just one quick follow-up question. What happened to the Task Force's documentation after the Thesaurus was published?

Capek: It's all in the archives up at Schlesinger. We started getting all of that in order, and being taught how to archive, which was not necessarily instinctive, right? You just send the folders, you don't mess with them, you don't clean them out ahead of time. We started archiving, probably late '80s, early '90s with that, especially because we had to move our office in early '90. And so a lot of the files from the early years were just sent up to Harvard, to Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, which is a wonderful, wonderful resource.

Belantara: And so is this housed under a wider collection under the Council?

Capek: Yeah, it would be with the Council's archives.

Belantara: And there's somewhere in there, the "Women's Thesaurus" folder, or-

Capek: Yeah.

Belantara: Box?

Capek: Yes, it's all there. Boxes and boxes of it, I expect. I'm sure the early lists are all there too, so if some poor graduate student decides they want a project at going back and deciding how lists evolved, that's one way to do it. I mean, it's a very interesting linguistic exercise, actually, but you know... what we were concentrating on at the time was being very pragmatic about it.

Belantara: What do you think of the "Women's Thesaurus" now? And would you change anything? Do you have any advice for anyone taking on an alternative thesaurus or classification project now?

Capek: One of the things I was very proud of, and I think worked very well, was the iterative process again, and casting a net as broadly as possible, with people who have different access to the language and just bringing in as many different voices as possible, because they spark each other. I mean, that's one of the things I saw happen over and over again in the Council that I'm very proud of actually. I try, on a panel, to get a researcher, a policy person and an activist, and they would get really grumpy at first, because nobody was speaking the same language or they weren't using the same words. They would have different meetings in different context. So they would have to leave aside the usual frameworks and engage differently. And that really helped to get much more interesting thinking together happening. And I think that's what happens, when you do a process like this, is that you have different voices, different perspectives, and it just really sparks everybody. And it's really important to be able to include as many different voices as possible in a project like this. But you've got to have also, at the same time, somebody that's willing to wrangle it and keep it in control. So it's an interesting process. I wouldn't want to do it again, but I'm very glad I got to do it.

Belantara: And so I just wanted to leave a little bit of space for you, Mary Ellen, if I missed anything that I should have asked you about, or if you just have any thoughts that you would like to share before we close out?

Capek: I just think that it's such an important way of framing stuff, and I'm so grateful you're doing this Ways of Knowing, because it's so important to make that much more public, because people don't really get that there are different ways of knowing, and the more we learn how to understand other people's frameworks, the kinder we are, the more we learn how to engage with them differently, but also, because there are so many groups that have been excluded by the use of language. I mean, that's really what I'm trying to write about now, that so many people have used language as a bludgeon to really get rid of so many others that they don't fit in the mainstream. It's not easy, because a lot of times, you name stuff and people go, "Uh-oh, we weren't supposed to talk about that. That's a taboo." But you know if it makes people nervous, that's exactly what you're supposed to talk about, especially if it's within an organization. So that's what I'm playing around with now. But the bottom line with all of this is that I'm very proud of this project and I really am hugely grateful I got to do it.