Women's studies

Women's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. It often includes feminist theory, women's history (eg history of women's suffrage) and social history, women's fiction, women's health, and the feminist and gender studies-influenced practice of most of the humanities and social sciences.

History

"Women's studies" was first conceived as an academic rubric apart from other departments in the late 1960s, as the second wave of feminism gained political influence in the academy through student and faculty activism. As an academic discipline, it was modeled on the American studies and ethnic studies (such as Afro-American studies) and Chicano Studies programs that had arisen shortly before it. The first Women's Studies Program in the United States was established on May 21, 1970 at San Diego State College after a year of intense organizing (women's consciousness raising groups, rallies, petition circulating, and operating unofficial or experimental classes and presentations before seven committees and assemblies) (SDSU Women's Studies Department). Carol Rowell Council was the student co-founder along with Dr. Joyce Nower, a literature instructor. A second program followed within weeks at Richmond College of the City University of New York, now The College of Staten Island/CUNY. In the 1970s many universities and colleges created departments and programs in women's studies, and professorships became available in the field which did not require the sponsorship of other departments.

Current courses in women's studies

Women's studies courses are available at many universities and colleges around the world. In 2006, the Artemis Guide to Women's Studies provides a listing of 395 programs in the United States, but may be out of date. Courses in the United Kingdom can be found through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service.

Criticisms of women's studies as a discipline

Karen Lerhman criticizes the state of women's studies as summarized below. She quotes Patai and Koertge who say that the feminism espoused in the vast majority of women's studies departments "bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory, one that is as all-inclusive as Marxism, as assured of it's ability to unmask hidden meanings as Freudian psychology, and as fervent in its condemnation of apostates as evangelical fundamentalism..." Lerhman goes on to say that feminist writers "by squelching all internal dissent" have "allowed hyperbolic rhetoric, false statistics, politicized scholarship, reverse sexism, and general silliness free reign".

• Orthodoxy and ideological policing
• Ostracization and/or termination of female dissidents
• Exclusion of male authors from course syllabi and scholarly papers
• Politicized scholarship and "thinly disguised indoctrination"
• Faculty appointments based on political rather than professional qualifications
• Questionable methodologies, statistics, and conclusions
• Advocacy diguised as research
• "Womb-like" classroom atmospheres where expressing unpopular opinions or asking unpopular questions is suppressed and where critical thinking is discouraged
• "Unremitting emphasis on women as oppressed victims"

Further reading

• Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies; Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, 1995, ISBN 0465098274
• The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex & Power in the Real World; Karen Lehrman, 1997, ISBN 0385474814
• Florence Howe (ed), Mari Jo Buhle (introduction), The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers, Paperback edition, New York: Feminist Press 2001
• Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti (eds.), Thinking differently : a reader in European women's studies, London etc. : Zed Books, 2002
• Ellen Messer-Davidow: Disciplining feminism : from social activism to academic discourse, Durham, NC etc. : Duke University Press, 2002

See also

• Florence Howe
• First-wave feminism
• Feminist studies
• Feminism
• Men's studies
• Radical feminism
• Psychoanalytic feminism
• Second-wave feminism
• Third-wave feminism

External links

• WSSLinks: women's studies web links from the American Library Association
• Women's Studies web resources
• Feminist Theory and Criticism 1. 1963-1972
• Center for Women's Studies of Tehran University, Iran
• The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
• What You Can Do With a Women's Studies Major.
• The Women's Studies Department at Wikiversity