Women's Studies

Women's Studies examines the scholarship and theory on the history, status, contributions, and experiences of women in diverse cultural communities, and on the significance of gender as a social construct and as an analytical category. Women's Studies challenges the gendered knowledge base that was assumed to be universal. As an interdisciplinary course of study, Women's Studies encourages the appreciation and understanding of gender as the basis of social relations of power, individual and collective identity, and the fabric of meaning and value of society. It is a study that is academic and activist. The activism component of Women's Studies comes from its political roots in feminism, a product of late 1960s women's liberation movements called the Second Wave. Feminism refers to the commitment to actively engage in political and social change that promotes equality in all aspects of life for those who are historically subordinated and oppressed by gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, disability, or other differences. The term feminism originated in19th-century France and combines the French word for woman, femme, with the suffix meaning political position, ism. According to feminist historians, the French used feminism as it referred to those who defended the cause of women. During the 1ate 1960s and 1970s, women took up the expression as it was associated with the work of the French philosopher Simone De Beauvoir, whose classic work The Second Sex (1949) was one of the early texts that considered how women have been thought about, and how women can think about themselves. The word gender refers to the socially constructed set of attitudes and behaviors usually organized as masculine or feminine. On an international basis, the heightened awareness of gender as a social construction was a result of the many activities by governments and organizations during the United Nations Decade on Women (1975–1985) and the UN-sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing (2000). During Beijing Plus 5,thousands of women from across the globe conferred around issues of feminism, the state of material conditions of women and girls, and the growth of women's and gender studies. According to the National Council for Research on Women, there are more than 300 centers in 80 countries that focus on women's issues and gender equality, and many of those units are located [Page 2331]in universities. However, the majority of Women's Studies departments and programs in higher education are found in the United States. As a contributing field of inquiry to women's studies, feminist anthropology incorporates the perspectives of feminism in its contribution to the study of the meanings and relationships of gender across the subfields of the discipline, following and influencing the paradigmatic shifts in intellectual inquiry and directing social policy.