Women Studies

Called the “academic arm of the women's movement” when it first emerged in United States colleges and universities, women studies drew from a number of different influences and inspirations that converged around institutions of higher learning during the 1960s. These influences included the informal, community-based classes associated with the free university movement, identity-based programs and departments recently launched in several universities such as Chicano studies and black studies, as well as consciousness-raising groups popularized within the women's liberation movement between 1968 and 1975. Considering itself to be both a corrective and a challenge to the power of academic institutions, generally, and established disciplines, specifically (which, for the most part, failed to include women as subjects of inquiry or as knowledge producers), women studies programs grew in numbers and popularity in the United States and across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. By the 1990s, 108 countries across all six continents boasted some form of women-oriented curriculum or programming in higher education.

Currently, women studies is among the most differentiated, multifaceted, and diversely constituted fields of inquiry in the academy. Whether working in certificate programs in community colleges, PhD-granting departments at top universities, or research institutes that take the lead in feminist-oriented policy making, women studies practitioners regularly cobble together programs from local resources and political landscapes to form, not so much a traditional discipline, but a field of inquiry and practice that focuses on women, gender, and other historically constituted identity categories (for example, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality). Paradoxically, even as women studies became an extremely influential enterprise, in the humanities and social sciences especially, and firmly established in the academy during the 1980s, it was—and often still is—tenuously situated in terms of institutional resources and academic legitimacy. A number of reasons for this paradox can be cited, including women studies' long-standing embrace of interdisciplinarity, its foundational mandate to both be activist and academic in orientation, and the continuous destabilization of its primary object of analysis: women. This entry discusses some of these issues.