Gloria Bowles is a writer and the founding coordinator of the UC Berkeley Women's Studies Program. Bowles was born in 1942 and grew up in Plymouth, Michigan. She earned her BA and MA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor before completing her doctorate in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Bowles is the author or editor of several works, including Theories of Women's Studies with Renate Duelli-Klein, Strategies for Women's Studies in the Eighties, Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation, and Living Ideas: A Memoir of the Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women's Studies. In this interview, Bowles discusses growing up in Michigan and her family, including her father's work in Democratic politics; attending the University of Michigan and editing the Michigan Daily Magazine; graduate work in comparative literature at the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley; foundations of the Women's Studies Program at UC Berkeley, including work as the coordinator and a lecturer starting in 1976; early moments in the field of women's studies; challenges in the Women's Studies Program and leaving in 1985; lecturing at Stanford University, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz before leaving academia; post-academia writing projects; the establishment of the Berkeley Women's Studies Movement Archive at The Bancroft Library; and feminist culture in the Bay Area.