WOMEN'S STUDIES

WOMEN'S STUDIES is an interdisciplinary university curriculum originating in the United States in the late 1960s. Almost simultaneously in 1969–1970, the first women's studies courses appeared in a handful of American universities, including Cornell University and San Diego State College (now University). By 1980 there were over 300 women's studies programs and departments in United States universities. That number had more than doubled again by 2000, and included nine Ph.D. programs (with at least one more in development). In addition, there were women's studies programs and departments at universities around the world, including many sites in Canada, Europe, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia, as well as Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Ireland, Sudan, Turkey, and Uganda.

In the late 1960s, as the proportion of women enrolled in colleges and universities increased, feminists identifying with a new women's liberation movement criticized American higher education for failing to address women's concerns on at least three levels: the lack of equal professional opportunities for women scholars and graduates (the "glass ceiling"); the absence of curricular content reflecting women's lives and contributions in the liberal arts, sciences, and technical fields; and the skewed, diminished, and often insulting experiences of women undergraduates and graduate students in and outside the classroom.

Unsurprisingly, as Marilyn Boxer has pointed out, many of the pioneers in developing women's studies courses were political activists, using the free university and civil rights movements as models for developing feminist perspectives in various disciplines and expanding women's access to male-dominated classrooms, programs, positions, and bodies of knowledge. Jean Fox O'Barr, for example, was five years beyond a political science dissertation that deflected questions about women when she began reading recent women's studies literature by Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, and others. As a result, O'Barr began questioning fundamental assumptions in her own discipline and eventually became a leader of the women's studies movement.

Women's studies scholars came from existing disciplines that, with the exception of home economics, were male-dominated. Women literary scholars and historians weighed in first, asking questions that repositioned women in their research and thus changed previous bodies of "knowledge." In literature, feminist scholars began to ask about the exclusion of women writers from the canon of "great" (and thus always studied) writers. In history, Marilyn Boxer cites Joan Kelly as recalling, "All I had done was to say, with Leonardo, suppose we look at the dark, dense immobile earth from the vantage point of the moon? … Suppose we look at the Renaissance from the vantage point of women?" (Boxer, p. 129). Kelly articulated the core perspective of women's studies. The add-women-and-stir approach, pasting women into existing pictures of historical process or social dynamics, did not generate transformative insights. Nor did it help to recognize individual women who did things that men usually do. Instead, significant changes in scholarship stemmed from shifted "vantage points." This shift usually involved identifying systems of values and priorities practiced by women, systems that might either supplement or challenge prevailing value systems that are enforced socially or politically. An example from historical scholarship is Nancy Cott's seminal articulation in 1977 of a "woman's sphere" of interpersonal relations in colonial and early national New England. In women's studies, perhaps even more than in other areas of study, we can often identify "clusters" of significant works elaborating new insights. In this area of colonial and nineteenth-century European American women's culture, Cott's book had been preceded by Barbara Welter's work and enriched by complementary theses offered by Linda Kerber, Mary Beth Norton, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Carroll Smith Rosenberg, and others.

The floodgates of revisionist scholarship opened in the 1970s and 1980s, not just in history, but also in anthropology, sociology, literature, communication, and psychology. Simultaneously, women scholars began feminist activism within their disciplinary organizations, creating women's caucuses and women's networking mechanisms, agitating for greater representation of women scholars on conference panels and in governing offices and committees, and identifying ways of mentoring women graduate students. The National Women's Studies Association was founded in 1977. Several notable journals of women's studies were established, including Feminist Studies in 1972 and Signs in 1975. Sage, founded in 1982, has become a widely respected journal in black women's studies.

The proliferation of courses, programs, and then departments of women's studies from 1970 through 2000 testifies to the development of an audience, a teaching faculty, and curriculum. Early women's studies advocates faced key questions about the content of the courses, the viability and structure of women's studies as a discipline, and the political mission of the enterprise. From the beginning, women's studies theorists have considered pedagogy an integral part of creating their discipline. Instructors have widely agreed that the dynamics of the classroom must somehow reflect and embody the theoretical struggles of the discipline. Would it be enough for a women's studies course to include content on women's lives, or must the course be taught from a feminist point of view? What was feminist pedagogy and what would a feminist classroom look like? Did traditional dynamics between instructor and students—grades, modes of address, even the arrangement of desks and chairs—echo prevailing power structures in a stultifying or an exemplary way? How would men experience a women's studies classroom, and how would a women's studies class experience men? Could men teach women's studies? Was there or should there be a difference between a women's studies course per se and courses in other home disciplines that reflected revised content on women?

The first courses constructed their content around women's experiences, which reflected the grassroots nature of liberationist politics as well as a democratic and particularist epistemology. Women's studies teachers found that the opening of the universities in the 1960s and 1970s brought in "nontraditional" students, often older women returning to school after raising children or after a divorce, to pursue education and credentials for new careers. This population has enriched women's studies classes by bringing perspectives and debates into the classroom that are relevant to postgraduate and non-college women. Most women's studies curricula are grounded by a specific introduction to women's studies course. Besides the introductory course, core curricula then may include courses on feminist theory and epistemology; political and legal issues; feminist perspectives on social structure and social power, race, class, sex and sexuality; and individual and family development issues.

Women's studies students generally take additional university courses allied with, or double-listed by, women's studies. These often include courses in sociology, history, anthropology, art and aesthetics, and literature. One of the thorniest sets of issues, and one that often lay beyond the control of the organizers of women's studies programs, concerned the structure of the women's studies program and the interaction between its administrative and curricular organization. Would it be more important to integrate women's content into a traditionally organized curriculum, or to create a beachhead of feminist scholarship and pedagogy? Would organization in a department isolate and "ghettoize" the women's studies endeavor? Would departmental status tempt faculty to abandon their mission to transform the entire university curriculum? Many early advocates of integration became converts to the departmental model because of the advantages of regular funding and tenure lines, which improved stability and seemed to bestow the stamp of legitimacy. Programs still far outnumbered departments as of 2001, but the number of women's studies departments continues its proportional increase. In institutions where the program model prevails, women's studies faculties usually have two homes, one in women's studies and one in another department.

Another set of issues that enriched and sometimes threatened to fragment the women's studies enterprise revolved around women's differences, particularly those of race, class, and sexuality. In 1969 Frances Beale updated the concept of "double jeopardy," the oppression of black women on the two counts of sex and race. African American women scholars, artists, and activists, as well as those of Asian, Native American, Hawaiian, Latina, and other racial and ethnic backgrounds, protested any assumption that women experienced a common set of life conditions, simply on the basis of sex. (The coining of the term "women of color" presented some of the same pitfalls of unintentional homogenization.) Powerful writings and performances helped create a new mosaic of images and understandings of the multiplicity of women's lives as lived in the United States and in other parts of the world. Often painfully, women's studies absorbed the idea that privilege was not just a category that separated women from men, but also women from each other.

Though there were many lesbian and bisexual scholars involved in the creation of women's studies on campuses across the United States, the women's studies movement resembled the women's movement in general in its initial ambivalence toward full and integrated recognition of non-heterosexual women. Interestingly, the evolution of gay and lesbian studies courses and programs in the last fifteen years has both reinforced the legitimacy of inclusion and, in some ways, diluted the impact of lesbian content in women's studies programs. The flip side of this dilemma, and one that echoes the uncomfortable position of black women in African American studies, is that lesbians often find themselves and their concerns under-represented in queer studies programs that, of course, include gay men.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, women's studies scholarship grappled with the same theoretical dilemmas that troubled and enlivened other humanities and social science disciplines. Some scholars believed that postmodernist interpretations threatened to eviscerate feminism, while others saw postmodernist discourse as a meta language that would salvage the intellectual integrity of the women's studies project. As the ranks of women's studies professors increasingly include scholars exposed to women's studies as undergraduates, the professional as well as intellectual dynamics of the field will continue to evolve.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boxer, Marilyn Jacoby. When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

O'Barr, Jean Fox. Feminism in Action: Building Institutions and Community Through Women's Studies. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Winkler, Barbara Scott, and Carolyn DiPalma, eds. Teaching Introduction to Women's Studies: Expectations and Strategies. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1999.

MinaCarson

See alsoEducation, Higher: Women's Colleges .