Women's studies

Women's studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppression; and the relationships between power and gender as they intersect with other identities and social locations such as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and disability.

Popular concepts that are related to the field of women's studies include feminist theory, standpoint theory, intersectionality, multiculturalism, transnational feminism, social justice, Matrixial gaze, affect studies, agency, bio-politics, materialism, and embodiment. Research practices and methodologies associated with women's studies include ethnography, autoethnography, focus groups, surveys, community-based research, discourse analysis, and reading practices associated with critical theory, post-structuralism, and queer theory. The field researches and critiques different societal norms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other social inequalities.

Women's studies is related to the fields of gender studies, feminist studies, and sexuality studies, and more broadly related to the fields of cultural studies, ethnic studies, and Africana studies.

Women's studies courses are now offered in over seven hundred institutions in the United States, and globally in more than forty countries.

History

Africa

The erasure of women and their activities in Africa was complex. When women's studies emerged in the 1980s, it focused on recovering women from the obscurity of all of African history caused by colonialism and the "patriarchal social systems" left behind in Africa after decolonization. Because systems prevailed that supported boys' education over that of girls, in the era following independence, there were few women who could read and write. Those who could were not encouraged to become professionals and often resorted to activism to address educational and other disadvantages women faced in the 1960s and 1970s. The first generation of scholars focused on establishing and legitimizing Africa's precolonial history. African scholars among DAWN's founding members were Fatema Mernissi (Morocco), Pala Okeyo (Kenya), and Marie-Angélique Savané (Senegal). These scholars inspired a second group of researchers and activists, which included: Rudo Gaidzanwa (Zimbabwe), Ayesha Imam (Nigeria), Patricia McFadden (Eswatini), Amina Mama (Nigeria), Takyiwaa Manuh (Ghana), Maria Nzomo (Kenya), and Charmaine Pereira (Nigeria). After the demise of Apartheid, the University of Cape Town, South Africa established the African Gender Institute in 1996 to facilitate research and gender studies in Africa. By 2003, full departments dedicated to gender and women's studies had also been established at Makerere University (Uganda), the University of Buea (Cameroon), and the University of Zambia (Zambia).

Americas

The first accredited women's studies course in the U.S. was held in 1969 at Cornell University. After a year of intense organizing of women's consciousness raising groups, rallies, petition circulating, and operating unofficial or experimental classes and presentations before seven committees and assemblies, the first women's studies program in the United States was established in 1970 at San Diego State College (now San Diego State University). In conjunction with National Women's Liberation Movement, students and community members created the ad hoc committee for women's studies. The second women's studies program in the United States was established in 1971 at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. It was largely formed through the efforts of many women in the English department, the administration, and the community. The College of Staten Island was the first United States University to graduate a student with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Women's Studies due to efforts by feminist professor Phyllis Chesler. By 1974, San Diego State University faculty members began a nationwide campaign for the integration of the department. At the time, these actions and the field were extremely political. Before formalized departments and programs, many women's studies courses were advertised unofficially around campuses and taught by women faculty members – without pay – in addition to their established teaching and administrative responsibilities. Then, as in many cases today, faculty who teach in women's studies often hold faculty appointments in other departments on campus.

The first scholarly journal in interdisciplinary women's studies, Feminist Studies, began publishing in 1972. The National Women's Studies Association (of the United States) was established in 1977.

In 1977, there were 276 women's studies programs nationwide in the United States. The number of programs increased in the following decade, growing up to 530 programs in 1989, which included the program at the University of Puerto Rico founded by Margarita Benítez in 1986. Around the 1980s, universities in the U.S. saw the growth and development of women's studies courses and programs across the country while the field continued to grapple with backlash from both conservative groups and concerns from those within the women's movement about the white, existentialist, and heterosexual privilege of those in the academy.

In Canada, the first few university courses in Women's Studies were taught in the early 1970s. In 1984, the federal government established five regional endowed chairs in Women's Studies for each region of the country:

Simon Fraser University (British Columbia),
University of Winnipeg and University of Manitoba (Prairies, joint chair)
Carleton University and the University of Ottawa (Ontario, joint chair),
Université Laval (Québec), and
Mount St Vincent University (Atlantic Canada).

Around the same time, women academics in Latin America began to form women's studies groups. The first chair of women's studies in Mexico was created in the political and social sciences faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1970. Starting in 1979, the Grupo Autónomo de Mujeres Universitarias (GAMU, Autonomous Group of University Women), which included both Mexican faculty and students, began meeting periodically to discuss how to introduce feminism to campuses across the country. In 1982, a women's studies program was created at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco. In 1984, academics formed the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (Center for Women's Studies) in the psychology faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The field was formalized with the creation of the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género (PUEG, University Program on Gender Studies) in 1992, at the urging of academics like Gloria Careaga, Teresita de Barbieri, , Araceli Mingo, Lorenia Parada, and Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte. That same year, Virginia Vargas began teaching women's studies in Peru, and the following year, she along with Virginia Guzmán Barcos and others, founded the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center. The center provided a research facility for women scholars and provided publishing for their works. First they met informally, then were able to gain official recognition in 1985 as the Grupo de Estudios Mujer y Sociedad (Women & Society Study Group) and finally in 1994, they launched the Programa de Estudios de Género, Mujer y Desarrollo (PGMD, Gender, Women and Development Studies Program) in the Human Sciences Department at the National University of Colombia.

The first women's study program in Paraguay was the (Paraguayan Center of Women's Studies) at the Universidad Católica "Nuestra Señora de la Asunción". It was founded in 1983 by Olga Caballero, Manuelita Escobar, Marilyn Godoy and Edy Irigoitia. The (GEMPA, Paraguayan Women's Studies Group) was founded at the Paraguayan Center for Sociological Studies in 1985 by Graziella Corvalán and Mirtha Rivarola.

Gender studies also began to be established at universities in Brazil in the 1980s and continued to expand throughout the 1990s. In 1992, Brazilian academics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro launched Revista Estudos Feministas, one of the primary academic journals on gender in Brazil.

Among the contributors for the inaugural issue were , Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, Maria Carneiro da Cunha, , Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, Valéria Lamego, Miriam Moreira Leite, Leila Linhares, Heleieth Saffioti, Bila Sorj, and others.

The political aims of the feminist movement that compelled the formation of women's studies found themselves at odds with the institutionalized academic feminism of the 1990s. As "woman" as a concept continued to be expanded, the exploration of social constructions of gender led to the field's expansion into both gender studies and sexuality studies. The field of women's studies continued to grow during the 1990s and into the 2000s with the expansion of universities offering majors, minors, and certificates in women's studies, gender studies, and feminist studies. The first official PhD program in Women's Studies was established at Emory University in 1990. there were 16 institutions offering a PhD in Women's Studies in the United States. Since then, UC Santa Cruz (2013), the University of Kentucky-Lexington (2013), Stony Brook University (2014), and Oregon State University (2016) also introduced a PhD in the field.

Australia

In 1956, Australian feminist Madge Dawson took up a lectureship in the Department of Adult Education at Sydney University and began researching and teaching on the status of women. Dawson's course, "Women in a Changing World", which focused on the socio-economic and political status of women in Western Europe, became one of the first women's studies courses.

Asia

Central Asia

In 2015, at Kabul University, the first master's degree course in gender and women's studies in Afghanistan began.

Europe

Elizabeth Bird traced the development of Women's Studies in the UK out of informal education run by the women's liberation movement (WLM), the Workers' Educational Association, "CR" or "consciousness raising" groups, left-wing activist groups, and extramural departments attached to universities and colleges. Bird notes that, according to feminist activists and scholars Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell who interviewed many participants in the 1960s-70s development of women's studies, "in the summer of 1969 Juliet Mitchell taught a short course entitled 'The Role of Women in Society' in the 'Anti University', which had been organised by radical academics as part of the student protest movement". Maggie Humm identifies this summer course as "Britain's first women's studies course".

In 1975, Margherita Rendel, Oonagh Hartnett, and Zoe Fairbairns wrote a guide outlining the 17 then-existing undergraduate courses, 1 postgraduate option, four colleges of education's offers, and six polytechnics' courses in Women's Studies – often called 'women in society' – in the United Kingdom. They compiled the guide from surveys of UK universities and adding to research previously published by Sue Beardon and Erika Stevenson for the National Union of Students in 1974.

Current courses in Women's Studies in the United Kingdom can be found through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service.

Theoretical traditions and research methods

thumb|300px|Students of Women and Gender Studies [[University of Haifa.]]

Early women's studies courses and curricula were often driven by the question "Why are women not included? Where are the women?". That is, as more women became more present in higher education as both students and faculty, questions arose about the male-centric nature of most courses and curricula. Women faculty in traditional departments such as history, English, and philosophy began offering courses focused on women. Drawing from the women's movement's notion that "the personal is political", courses also began to develop around sexual politics, women's roles in society, and how women's personal lives reflect larger power structures.

Since the 1970s, scholars in women's studies have taken post-modern approaches to understand gender and its intersections with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, age, and (dis)ability, and how these shape and maintain power structures within society. With this turn, there has been a focus on language, subjectivity, and social hegemony, and how the lives of subjects, however they identify, are constituted. At the core of these theories is the notion that, however one identifies, gender, sex, and sexuality are not intrinsic but are socially constructed.

Major theories employed in women's studies courses include feminist theory, intersectionality, standpoint theory, transnational feminism, and social justice. Research practices associated with women's studies place women and their experiences at the center of inquiry through quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Feminist researchers acknowledge their role in the production of knowledge and make explicit the relationship between the researcher and the research subject. Theorists and writers such as bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir, Patricia Hill Collins, and Alice Walker added to the field of feminist theory with respect to how race and gender mutually inform the experiences of women of color with works such as Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (hooks), In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (Walker), and Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Collins). Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger introduced the field of matrixial gaze, matrixial (matricial) space and time, with a set of new concepts and vocabulary to introduce the feminine unconscious from psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives. Alice Walker coined the term womanism to situate black women's experiences as they struggle for social change and liberation, while simultaneously celebrating the strength of black women, their culture, and their beauty. Patricia Hill Collin's contributed the concept of the "matrix of domination" to feminist theory, which reconceptualized race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression that shape experiences of privilege and oppression.

thumb|261x261px|Woman in Women's Studies area of the library

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in people, human experiences, and society. Associated with the third wave of feminism, Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality has become the key theoretical framework through which various feminist scholars discuss the relationship of between one's social and political identities such as gender, race, age, and sexual orientation, and received societal discrimination. Intersectionality posits that these relationships must be considered to understand hierarchies of power and privilege, as well as the effects in which they manifest in an individual's life. Though events and conditions of social and political life are often thought to be shaped by one factor, intersectionality theorizes that oppression and social inequality are a result of how powerful individuals view the combination of various factors; emphasizing that discrimination is accounted for by power, not personal identity. developed in the 1980s as a way of critically examining the production of knowledge and its effects on practices of power. Standpoint theory operates from the idea that knowledge is socially situated and underrepresented groups and minorities have historically been ignored or marginalized when it comes to the production of knowledge. Emerging from Marxist thought, standpoint theory argues for analysis that challenges the authority of political and social "truths". Standpoint theory, assumes that power lies solely within the hands of the male gender as the process of decision making in society is constructed exclusively for, and by men. Women's studies began incorporating transnational feminist theory into its curricula as a way to disrupt and challenge the ways in which knowledge regarding gender is prioritized, transmitted, and circulated in the field and academy. Transnational feminist theory is continually challenging the traditional divides of society, in which are crucial to ongoing politics and cultural beliefs. A key recognition advanced from the transnational feminist perspective is that gender is, has been, and will continue to be, a global effort. Furthermore, a transnational feminist perspective perpetuates that a lack of attention to the cultural and economic injustices of gender, as a result of globalization, may aid in the reinforcing of global gender inequalities; though, this can only come about when one occupies globally privileged subject positions. Women's studies students engage in social justice projects, although some scholars and critics are concerned about requiring students to engage in both mandated activism and/or social justice work. Women's studies not only focus on concepts such as domestic violence, discrimination in the workplace, and gender differences in the division of labor at home, but gives a foundation for understanding the root cause of these concepts, which is the first step to making for a better life for women.

Agency

Agency may be defined as the capability to make choices individually and freely. An individual's agency may be restricted due to various social factors, such as gender, race, religion, and social class. Feminists use agency in an attempt to create new forms of autonomy and independence from the reshaping of gender relations that is taking place in global society. Materialism possesses significant ties to the Marxist theories of history, agency, and ideology; though, it may be distinguished through the incorporation of language and culture to its philosophy. Students are encouraged to take an active role in "claiming" their education, taking responsibility for themselves and the learning process. Women's studies programs and courses are designed to explore the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other topics that are involved in identity politics and societal norms through a feminist lens. Women's studies courses focus on a variety of topics, including media literacy, sexuality, race and ethnicity, women's history, queer theory, multiculturalism, and other closely related areas. Faculty incorporate these components into classes across a variety of topics, including popular culture, women in the economy, reproductive and environmental justice, and women's health across the lifespan. Bracha L. Ettinger's matrixial theory is influential in the fields of art pedagogy in relation to ethics of care.

Women's studies programs are involved in social justice work and often design curricula that are embedded in theory and activism outside the classroom. Some women's studies programs offer community-based internships, allowing students to experience how institutional structures of privilege and oppression directly affect women's lives. Women's studies curricula often encourage students to participate in service-learning activities in addition to discussing and reflecting on course materials. However, Daphne Patai, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has criticized this aspect of women's studies programs, arguing that they place politics over education, stating "the strategies of faculty members in these programs have included policing insensitive language, championing research methods deemed congenial to women (such as qualitative over quantitative methods), and conducting classes as if they were therapy sessions." Since women's studies students analyze identity markers including gender, race, class, and sexuality, this often results in dissecting institutionalized structures of power. As a result of these pedagogies, women's studies students leave university with a toolkit to effect social change and address power inequalities in society.

Notable women's studies scholars include Charlotte Bunch, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Barbara Ransby.

Internal academic criticism

In the book Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies, 30 women's studies academics came together to criticise the "unhealthy conditions and self-destructive tendencies that appear to be intrinsic to many Women's Studies programs". Professors spoke of being unable to "discuss their concerns about this belligerent anti-intellectualism with other faculty members in Women's Studies", with claims of a "constant emphasis on political purity.... from both students and professors".

Notes

References

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Brooks, A. (2007). Feminist standpoint epistemology: Building knowledge and empowerment through women's lived experiences. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 53–82). CA: Sage Publications.
Brooks, A. & Hesse-Biber, S.N. (2007). An invitation to feminist research. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 1–24). CA: Sage Publications.
Buch, E.D. & Staller, K.M. (2007). The feminist practice of ethnography. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 187–221). CA: Sage Publications.
Dill, T.B & Zambrana, R. (2009). Emerging Intersections: Race, Class and Gender in Theory, Policy and Practice. NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000). Sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. .
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Harding, S. (1987). Introduction: Is there a feminist method? In Harding, S. (ed.), Feminism & Methodology. (pp. 1–14). IN: Indiana University Press.
Hesse-Biber, S.N. (2007). The practice of feminist in-depth interviewing. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 111–148). CA: Sage Publications.
Hyam, M. (2004). Hearing girls' silences: Thoughts on the politics and practices of a feminist method of group discussion. Gender, Place, and Culture, 11 (1), 105–119.
Leavy, P.L. (2007a). Feminist postmodernism and poststructuralism. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 83–108). CA: Sage Publications.
Leavy, P.L. (2007b). The practice of feminist oral history and focus group interviews. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 149–186). CA: Sage Publications.
Leavy, P.L. (2007c). The feminist practice of content analysis. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 223–248). CA: Sage Publications.
Leckenby, D. (2007). Feminist empiricism: Challenging gender bias and "setting the record straight." In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 27–52). CA: Sage Publications.
Lykes, M.B. & Coquillon, E. (2006). Participatory and Action Research and feminisms: Towards Transformative Praxis. In Sharlene Hesse-Biber (Ed.). Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis. CA: Sage Publications.
Miner-Rubino, K. & Jayaratne, T.E. (2007). Feminist survey research. In Hesse-Biber, S.N. & Leavy, P.L. (Eds.), Feminist Research Practice (pp. 293–325). CA: Sage Publications.

External links

Smith College List of Graduate Programs in Women's Studies and Gender Studies
WSSLinks: women's studies web links from the University of Toronto
Women's Studies web resources
Center for Women's Studies of Tehran University, Iran
The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
Karen Lerhman, Off Course, Mother Jones, September 1993
Main focus "Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte in Westfalen"
List of Women's Studies Programs around the World
List of Women's Studies Programs in the United States
Women's Studies Resources from WIDNET: Women in Development Network
Archival papers of Kay Armatage (key founder of the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto) held at the University of Toronto Archives and Record Management Services