By Karah-Leigh Hancock
VALDOSTA — Dr. Tracy Woodard-Meyers wants to make the world a better place.
As a professor at Valdosta State University, Meyers is the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program. She teaches a variety of classes from Race, Class and Gender to Clinical Sociology.
While the program offers a minor, Meyers hopes that one day the program expands.
“I would love to see the Women’s and Gender Studies program grow into a major,” Meyers said. “Or into a graduate degree, or at least a graduate certificate so that people can understand gender issues.”
The Women’s and Gender Studies program has around 40 minors. During the last four years, the program has graduated about 12 minors.
“I think we’re up to 52 or 53, but that number needs to be a lot bigger.”
And that is Meyers’ mission.
Dr. Tracy Woodard-Meyers was born and raised in the Lakeland, Fla., area and lived there until she was 19. After spending a year at a local community college on a full academic scholarship, she transferred to
Florida State University in Tallahassee where she received her bachelor’s degree in child development.
Two years later, Meyers graduated with her master’s degree in marriage and family relations and went to work in nearby Quincy, Fla.
“I did AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and food-stamp eligibility for about six months,” Meyers said. “I loved working in that area. It’s a very socioeconomically depressed area. Lots of season workers and pickers.”
After working in Quincy, Meyers applied for a job as a Medicaid supervisor and then went to work with child-abuse investigations.
“I really wanted to do (that) and then I went to the Florida Abuse Registry.”
Meyers also worked at Planned Parenthood in Tallahassee during this time.
“I was like the person they would talk to and go in, assist, draw blood, anything that needed to be done,” she said. “I would go to the fraternities and sororities because the majority of our clients were actually women from the campus. So I would go into the community and give sexually transmitted disease lectures and birth-control lectures.”
Meyers went back to school for her Ph.D. in family relations and trained for a year to be a therapist, but that soon changed.
“I was ABD, all but dissertation,” Meyers said. “I thought I was going to be a therapist. I went back to school and I wanted to stay in the field and be a practitioner. Then I saw this position after I did my one year of training.”
Though her year of training overwhelmed her, Meyers saw the open position at VSU as an opportunity to do something that she always liked — teaching.
“I always liked teaching,” she said. “That’s what I did for Planned Parenthood for my master’s (degree). I put together training manuals and a curriculum and did all the education and absolutely loved it. I saw this position hanging on the bulletin board and got the job. That was in 1994.”
Meyers began working at VSU when the college had just become a regional university with less than 5,000 students.
“We (sociology department) were housed over in the nursing building,” she said. “Five of us got hired in and literally my office was like this little closet in the downstairs nursing department. Myself and another person, an anthropologist, we were stacked in there. I literally had to crawl over her desk to get to my desk.”
While the space was cramped for the new colleagues, it did come with its fun moments.
“It’s so funny because every time someone would come in, they would think she was my secretary,” she said. “Then we moved into the U.C. (University Center) and we were the first persons in (there). Dr. (Louis) Levy was my department head at the time so he hired me in.”
Meyers’ husband, Dr. Christopher Meyers, also followed her to VSU.
“He followed me,” she said. “(He) was ABD like me and it took five or six years for him to get hired, but before he worked at GMC (Georgia Military College) for a while and did adjunct here before getting hired.”
While both Meyerses attended Florida State, they didn’t meet there.
“We actually met in Sunday school at church,” she said. “He was impressed with my Nike running shoes because I was talking about my running shoes or something. He was a big athlete and was impressed that I work out.”
After moving to Valdosta, the Meyers started a family with the addition of their son, Jacob, who is now 12 and in the sixth grade.
“He’s a good kid, smart kid,” she said, describing her son. “He’s a neat guy and my hero.”
She also believes that life in Valdosta has its ups and downs.
“Sometimes I love it (living in Valdosta), but some days I wished I was in a bigger city,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t like the non-progressive thinkers, conservatives, but I have some wonderful friends here. It’s small enough to get around. You don’t have the traffic and stuff, because when I lived in Tallahassee, I lived literally one traffic light, not even a quarter of a mile (from work). It was on the main road so I couldn’t walk because there was no sidewalks. It would take 45 minutes sitting in traffic to get home.”
In 2005, Meyers became interim director for the Women’s Studies Program at VSU and later became the director for the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She’s making the most out of her position.
This past summer, Meyers went to Tucson, Ariz., to a spa where a workshop in equine therapy was being held.
“It was a Wyatt Webb workshop where he does therapy (and) a horse is his co-therapist,” Meyers said. “I wanted to see what equine therapy was about and I just fell in love. He’s amazing. It was really interesting because the way you interact with the horse tells a lot about how you interact with people. He puts you in a ring with a horse and has you do certain things. He says you’re all energy and you’re feeding energy off of each other. It was really interesting.
“I flew into El Paso (Texas) and drove to Tucson, but from Tucson, I drove through the desert to San Diego,” she said. “It was so cool because I’d never been out and all of a sudden I see these signs in the middle of the desert that say ‘radiator water’ and there’s this big bucket of water, because you’re in the middle of the desert and I’m thinking ‘holy ..., maybe this wasn’t such a great idea,’ but I had no problems.”
While out West, Meyers took a side trip that changed her life and gave her inspiration for a way her students could experience the world.
While in El Paso, Meyers visited areas along the Mexican border, near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s deadliest city. She is developing a program with a colleague where they plan to take students to El Paso to study issues on the borderland.
“It’s a gender and women’s studies class and it’s basically taking people out there to study the issues around the Latinos and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and how our capitalist greed has affected these poor women that are moving up to the border to work in malcadoras for three dollars a day,” she said.
The Women’s and Gender Studies program applied for a QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan) grant and were funded $40,000 for the program to help give travel stipends for students to go study issues such as immigration, border crossings, poverty, human rights, social justice and globalization.
The trip to El Paso is just one of the ways that Meyers works outside of the classroom to help students understand the world better.
Among her other projects is “The Vagina Monologues.” The episodic play first came to VSU four years ago. While the play has been criticized by many since its 1996 debut, Meyers is shocked that it’s been so well received in Valdosta.
“What’s really amazing to me about ‘The Vagina Monologues’ is that it has been so well received here,” she said. “By everybody, I mean the community, everybody. I thought the first year we put those on, ‘Well, we live in a pretty conservative Bible belt community,’ but no. I’m sure there are people who don’t appreciate it here, because they don’t really understand what it’s about. But when people realize it’s about awareness against sexual assault and violence against women and we are going to also educate people about women’s sexual agency and we are going to fundraise so we can have money to help women that are being abused. Then they go ‘OK, I get it.’”
Meyers is also in charge of The Clothesline Project, a program designed to address the issues of violence against women. Victims, or people who have known victims, design T-shirts with messages, expressing their emotions.
The Clothesline Project is put up around campus several times a year. This past October, for Domestic Violence Month, the T-shirts were hung around the pedestrian mall in the middle of campus.
Along with all of her other projects, Meyers is taking a look at sexual-violence policies on campuses. Issues such as sexual violence, domestic violence, prejudice, social class, racism, sexism are just some of the issues that Meyers teaches in her classes.
To get on the students’ levels, Meyers uses pop culture to help students understand.
“Lady GaGa is on my list now,” she said. “I still listen to all the music and show the videos in class. Her (Lady GaGa) whole video, it’s all sexists. It’s objectifying women, making light of that ‘Paparazzi,’ where there’s that date rape scene and he throws her over the balcony.
“Then she’s disabled and it’s almost like they’re making fun of the disabled people. That’s really disturbing.”
But sometimes, even the latest pop song doesn’t relate to students who don’t understand the issues.
“Something that I’ve learned about that Race, Class and Gender class, people have heard about race, they know about class, but when I start talking about gender, they’re like ‘what?’ People just don’t know, they had never heard of these issues,” Meyers said. “They hear about women wanting equal rights or they think feminists are all lesbians who hate men. They have all of these really skewed notions about what it’s all about.
“People aren’t getting it, the sexual objectification, all of this stuff that’s going on around women, those gender issues. They all know about gay and lesbians, but gender, they can’t figure it out.”
Students aren’t always so willing to listen to the new ideas and way of living that Meyers talks about in her classes.
“It’s been challenging for me to go back to critical thinking,” Meyers said. “I see a lot of students who aren’t open to thinking and I tell them ‘to park your prejudice at the door, park it, come in and listen, then pick it back up. Those are your opinions and values and you get to have them, but when you’re in here, be open enough to listen and be respectful and be willing to hear.’ I’ve seen them go ‘Gosh, I never though of it this way, that kind of makes sense.’”
As a professor, it’s frustrating for Meyers that sometimes she can’t be heard.
“My job isn’t to change (their) mind,” she said. “My job is to put this information out there and let (them) hear it. There’s no room in this society for intolerance. We’re a diverse world and we should embrace it. Hopefully (they) will know (understanding) will help make this world a better place.”
