A career dedicated to empowering women

A connection with St. Cloud State University that started during the second wave of the women’s movement will last for generations to come, if Catharine Van Nostrand has anything to say about it.

Van Nostrand has dedicated her life’s work to empowering women. The now-retired founder and consultant of the firm Catharine Van Nostrand & Associates, she made a career out of addressing the bias and sexism women often face in the workplace. Her experiences led to her facilitating workshops and appearing as a featured speaker at events, as well as becoming an accomplished author and contributing journalist.

Van Nostrand credits her younger sister with being the first to connect her to the women’s movement.

“It was my sister who first lit the light or lit the candle. … My husband and I were married in 1960 and he was a physician, so you can imagine he had very demanding hours; he was a surgeon. And my sister said to me once — I had three small children — and she said, ‘Your time is just as valuable as your husband’s.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that can’t be possible. He’s out there saving lives and all I’m doing is raising kids.’ It was very inspiring,” Van Nostrand said. “I knew I had talent as an educator, and I had taught in classrooms and I wanted to carry on as an educator. I could see through women’s groups I belonged to and so forth — we actually belonged to consciousness-raising groups — I could see that many women were struggling to do something besides be identified with their husbands. It was this idea of understanding that I had gifts as an educator, and that I had sympathies toward empowering women, and I had three daughters — and of course now I have a granddaughter — so it was very significant of me to help to create a place in the world where my daughters could have a better life, have more opportunity and have less pushback from the powers that be.”

Van Nostrand participated in a number of workshops through SCSU directed toward women in the ’70s, and then proposed to the psychology department that she teach assertiveness training. She ended up teaching courses in beginning assertiveness training and advanced assertiveness training. She said it made sense to offer the training at SCSU, as her husband taught aviation physiology at the University and their children attended the campus lab school.

“We felt like St. Cloud State was a place where we understood what they were trying to do,” she said.

When Patricia “Pat” Samuel joined the University in the early ’80s, Van Nostrand knew who she was from attending some of Samuel’s workshops, and the two quickly became friends. Van Nostrand later started pursuing her master’s degree long-distance from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, and was encouraged to enlist a local adviser from SCSU.

“Immediately I thought of Pat, and so I asked her. I said to her, ‘Pat, I think I’m going to write a manual for leaders. It’d just be a small manual.’ And she said, ‘Okay.’ And then it turned into a book,” Van Nostrand said. “She was enormously helpful, because she knew about Sage Publications, which was a textbook publisher in California. They publish things on social justice and gender issues and many other topics. … So I’m forever grateful for not only how she was my adviser and came to my home and met with me and everything, but how she continually provided me with resources and articles. She radicalized me; she made it clear just how difficult it was for women in our culture to get ahead and the sexism that all of us faced.”

In 1993, Van Nostrand published the book “Gender-Responsible Leadership: Detecting Bias, Implementing Interventions.” Its intention was to help leaders “acknowledge their own gender bias and to intervene when they diagnose sexism in others,” and delves into topics still relevant today, Van Nostrand said, especially as a woman campaigns to be elected president of the United States.

“We are still struggling with some of the same issues,” she said. “We all have to recognize our implicit bias.”

A long-standing philanthropic supporter of St. Cloud State across multiple areas of the University, Van Nostrand’s most recent area of focus has been on removing barriers to education for future generations of leaders.

“I realized that a fifth of students in many places are parents, and I also realized that some kids don’t go straight from high school to college; they work a while, so they might enter later or re-enter,” she said. “They might be a first-generation student or immigrants, they might be single parents, they might be whatever. And I want to reach kids who really want to learn, but have barriers.”

Van Nostrand hopes to help today’s students become tomorrow’s leaders, encouraging them to advocate for the causes they’re passionate about and ultimately impact their communities for the better. Thanks to her support, that mission is closer to being accomplished for SCSU students.

“Developing and supporting socially conscious student leader-advocates is a core component of our work at the Women’s Center,” said Dr. Heather Brown, director of the SCSU Women’s Center. “We are especially excited to explore with students their proposals for just-in-time awards for workshops, special projects, and other educational activities that advance the vision of the fund and honor the life’s work of Catharine Van Nostrand.”