Vermont Woman was recently invited for a private tour and conversation with Burlington sculptor Barbara Zucker. The massive scale of Zucker’s private studio provides the physical work space that she requires to conceptualize, create and produce individual sculptures or a whole series of sculptures as she has done most recently. These grow from her self-realization as a woman, and it is clear she is an artist who lives with fierce sensitivity, intensity and awareness of a cultural landscape that both idolizes and victimizes femininity.

Barbara Zucker is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has an M. A. in sculpture from Hunter College. She is one of the founders of A. I.R Gallery in New York City, the first all-female cooperative women’s art gallery in the U. S., begun in 1972.

Zucker’s work has been widely exhibited, including in solo shows at Robert Miller Gallery, Artists Space, Sculpture Center, Tufts University, Pam Adler Gallery, Moore College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work is also placed in collections at the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hebrew Union College Museum and others.

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Jan Reynolds, of Stowe, Vermont, has always been one of the guys, from growing up on a dairy farm with six siblings, to participating in male-dominated mountaineering expeditions, to parenting two sons. But it was through being one of the guys, she says now, that she learned what it is to be a woman.

An author of 17 books for children and adults, Reynolds’ 2013 work, High Altitude Woman: From Extreme Sports to Indigenous Culture; Discovering the Power of the Feminine (Inner Traditions) chronicles her lifelong career of mountaineering and biathlon adventure.

In college she helped lead the UVM women’s Nordic ski team to a 1978 Division I National Championship, and she spent time on a women’s biathlon team. She held the women’s high altitude skiing record and was part of a team that flew a hot-air balloon over Mt. Everest, setting the altitude record there, too. She has been a member of expeditions to China, Tibet, Nepal, New Zealand, Australia, Lapland, the Amazon Basin, Canadian Arctic, Mongolia and the Sahara.

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Women’s Studies programs, as they have traditionally been called, are currently part of the curriculum at three Vermont colleges and the University of Vermont (UVM). While the programs vary in size and structure, they are all dedicated to the belief that the subject makes a measurable contribution in both academic settings and the wider world.

By the time the first Women’s Studies course in the country was offered in 1969, at Cornell University, feminist scholars and activists had been debating the history, experience and perspectives of women for some time. Concerned about the power inequalities and stereotypical assumptions about women that prevailed, a constituency for women’s rights and a movement called second-wave feminism had begun.

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Women are pissed off—so to speak— about lack of discussion of a problem that is causing a lot of grief. A visitor to the Vermont Woman website writes:

I would like to encourage you to do an article on pelvic organ prolapse, a widespread problem for women, which includes but is not synonymous with incontinence. There is an appalling lack of comprehensive information addressing and integrating medical and non-medical options for women who want to remain healthy and active with POP...

...Right on, sister. Here we go. But first, some ancient history.

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