Women's Studies

From the Ferment of the Sixties

Women's studies as an academic rubric unto itself emerged in the latter part of 1960s, growing out of faculty and student activism common to feminism's second wave-a movement defined by women's fight for reproductive freedoms and sexual, family, and workplace parities. The late 1800s to 1920s suffrage movement, known as feminism's first wave, is an earlier precursor to women's political struggle for equality that is fundamental to the discipline's historical formation. Mapped as riding the tails of american and ethnic studies, women's studies-originally termed female studies-first appeared in 1970 at San Diego State College, now San Diego University. Richmond College, then part of the City University of New York, quickly followed suit, as did numerous colleges and universities worldwide.

Beginning as scattered courses cropping up in established disciplines such as philosophy, english, and most prominently history, women's studies is now a discrete field with certificates of concentration and degrees awarded at the bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. levels. With only a handful of Ph.D. programs, interest exceeds space. The University of Maryland, for example, often receives over 100 applications for six Ph.D. slots. From its 1960s inception into the academy to its current expansion in identity-from strictly women to, on many campuses, women and gender, or just gender studies; and branches of research, from solely women, to at many institutions, women, gender, sexuality, masculinity, queer-women's studies has and continues to push against the traditional disciplinary boundaries defining academia. Despite more than 900 women's studies programs or departments operating in institutions around the globe, women's studies remains a celebrated but contested space of knowledge.

Some of women's studies's contested ground reflects a pedagogical base that challenges age-old educational doctrines rooted in masculine thought. Central to women's studies’ scholarly conception is opposition to patriarchal knowledge produced through male-oriented worldviews known to isolate women from their own realities.

Corrective in measure, women's studies advances feminist knowledge devoid of masculine-based epistemologies that have marginalized or excluded women's perspectives. Informed through branches of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts, women's studies provides a lens into the historical, social, psychological, and biological construction of sex and gender identity, and it extends a feminist platform to analyze the complex and intersectional dimensions of person and place studied through diverse theoretical orientations, such as liberal, radical, queer, eco, Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodern, and black feminist thought.

Sexual identity, gender variance, violence against women, female genital mutilation, women's embodiment, politics of difference, and reproductive technologies illustrate some of the thematic rudiments distinct to women's studies curricula. The intersectional dimensions of race, class, gender, and ability also form the crux of women's studies knowledge. With its intra-disciplinary and multidisciplinary reach, most present-day academic disciplines draw on women's and/or gender-based constructs.

...