Texas colleges were also a culture shock to Beverly. When she was in graduate school at another Texas university she asked me not to name, she said there were no women teaching any of her classes. In one class, a student said every person on welfare should be mandatorily sterilized. When the professor asked Beverly what she thought of that idea, Beverly brought in data on fertility rates among people on welfare that disproved the other student’s point. I’m not like these people, she’d think to herself.

Still, she told me, “It was good for me to have gone there, because I needed to know that there are people in the world that think like that.”

When, in 1999, Midwestern State offered her a job as a sociology professor, Beverly moved back to Wichita Falls, determined to broaden her students’ horizons and to reveal how society forges our notions of masculinity and femininity. For many students in Beverly’s gender-studies class, the existence of gender inequality was an entirely new concept. In the early years, when Beverly brought up gender norms, some students would respond with teachings from the Bible. They denied that gender inequality existed, and a few would drop the class. Some students believed feminism was harmful to families. Once, in an introductory sociology class, a student yelled out something like, “You’re a liberal, aren’t you?”

Not all the students attending the college are from Wichita Falls, of course, or even from Texas. This being college, it was not entirely devoid of liberals, either. One group of students asked her to be an advisor to their feminist student group. And even a quinoa-munching Berkeleyite might find Beverly’s research topics a little edgy. Beverly studies cheating, rape myths, and the business models of sex workers—a line of research for which she’s interviewing women who “cam,” or perform sex acts on web cameras for money. Once, a colleague jokingly made a spanking motion in reference to her research. Another colleague, upon learning that she researches BDSM, sent her newspaper clips about a woman who had been kidnapped and forced to be a sex slave. “This is not my population,” she responded.

But in her first few years of teaching the gender class, getting through to the students was a more pressing problem. She heard from a few of her students that some refused to take her class because she’s a feminist. A rumor spread that Beverly’s a lesbian, which was helped along by the fact that she wears no makeup and that her ex-husband’s name was “Dana.” (“I’m not a lesbian,” Beverly told me. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”)

There are things Beverly liked about Wichita Falls. On a sociologist’s salary, she could afford a nice life and a four-bedroom house. She lived fifteen minutes from her office, and parking was cheap. She’s just a few hours from either Dallas or Oklahoma City.