Emily Bent: From Alum to Professor

By Alyssa Mease

You probably haven’t seen Emily Bent, a professor of women’s and gender studies, on campus much recently. That’s because the ’03 graduate of the College is also the new executive director of Sage Girl, a member of the United Nation’s the Working Group on Girls and is currently finishing her Ph.D in global women’s studies from the University of Ireland, Galway.

Originally a math major, she had a change of heart her sophomore year. “I was sitting there on my bed doing homework or something and I thought, ‘Man, this is boring.’ So I dropped all of my math classes and just picked up whatever I could find,” Bent said.

One of the classes she picked up was Politics of Sexuality and she subsequently changed her major to women’s and gender studies. After receiving an e-mail aimed at freshman about a new program being started on campus, Women in Leadership and Learning (W.I.L.L.), Bent asked Ellen Friedman, then the chair of the women’s and gender studies department, if she could join. She and Valerie Baker were the only sophomores accepted, as well as fewer than 20 freshmen women.

“(W.I.L.L. is now) hugely different from when I was a student. We were part of the initial growing pains, and didn’t have all of the resources this group had,” Bent said. “There was less of a sisterhood feeling than there is now. I didn’t realize at the time how much of a network we were creating.”

Bent, a survivor of an eating disorder, is also the founder of Bod Squad, an on-campus organization focused on promoting a healthy body image. “Women’s studies allowed me to think about that experience differently… it wasn’t something I spoke about with anyone,” she said. “As soon as I started taking classes and reading feminist texts, it gave me a language I didn’t have that I could use.”

She has the eating disorder awareness ribbon tattooed on her wrist as a reminder of what she has overcome.

As part of her women’s and gender studies capstone course, and under the guidance of W.I.L.L. program director Mary Lynn W. Hopps, Bent and Baker created a website detailing what can be done with a women’s and gender studies major. There were links to internship opportunities and graduate programs, as well as job opportunities.

“Our interaction with (Hopps) made the program; it made us feel more connected,” Bent said. That very website was used by the department for a few years.

After finishing her undergraduate coursework at the College, Bent went on to get her master’s degree from Rutgers University in women’s and gender studies. Instead of writing a thesis, she chose to work with Hopps to create the first real capstone course for the W.I.L.L. program.

“I used W.I.L.L. as a model for what women’s theory could look like in a practical sense,” Bent said. “(The course) looked at the way the W.I.L.L. program compared to various leadership development programs.” This course was Bent’s first attempt at teaching. “(Hopps) really helped coach me through it,” she said. She had to learn everything from syllabus writing to assigning and grading work.

Bent went on to work for Project Self-Sufficiency, Girls Learn International and the Working Group on Girls. She received a grant from Susan G. Komen, developed programs to teach high-school girls how to give themselves breast exams, worked on preventing teen pregnancy and partnered girls in the United States with girls in other countries. “After this, I got much more involved in political rights,” Bent said.

In 2008 she “randomly” applied to the University of Ireland, Galway and lived in Ireland for two years. She did her dissertation research at the United Nations, using the same contacts she had from her prior work experiences.

“I’d love to be a part of connecting W.I.L.L. and the work I do with girls… help high school girls start thinking about college and connect young girls to college girls, not just older women,” she said.

Bent has recently become the executive director of Sage Girl, thanks to networking through W.I.L.L. “In a very weird way, W.I.L.L. and (Hopps) have been puppeteers for me, sending me in my next direction,” she said.