Women's Studies: The Basics

Bonnie G. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032524658
• eBook ISBN: 9781351022965
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Women's Studies: The Basics is an accessible introduction to the pathbreaking and cross-disciplinary study of women—past and present. Tracing the history of the field from its origins, this revised and updated text sets out the main topics making up the discipline, exploring its global development and its relevance to our own times. A new chapter on militarization and violence provides fresh insight into trends in the contemporary world and adds to curricular significance. Reflecting the diversity of the field, core themes include:

• The interdisciplinary nature of women's studies
• Core feminist theories and the feminist agenda
• Issues of intersectionality: women, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion
• Violence, militarization, security, and peace
• Women, sexuality, and the body

Women's Studies: The Basics provides an informed foundation for those new to the subject and is especially meant to guide undergraduates and postgraduates concentrating in women's studies and gender studies. Those in related disciplines will find in it a valuable overview of and background to women-centered issues and concerns, including global ones. The work also provides an updated list of suggested reading to help in further study, classroom presentations, and written exercises.

1

THE INVENTION OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

Women’s Studies is arguably the most revolutionary new field of intellectual inquiry of our current age. In its early form Women’s Studies brought all of women’s experience under the scholarly microscope, subjecting it to the most advanced scientific methods available in the university. Researchers would dig up facts and develop insights about that experience and then teachers and students looked at the findings coming from an array of disciplines, processing and often perfecting them. Women’s Studies programs include almost every perspective—from the natural sciences to the social sciences, from law to the arts. This breadth makes Women’s Studies the most wide-ranging of academic fields. Its rich diversity provides the judgments, research, and energy of a broad group of scholars and students. They advance and constantly transform the discipline.

Women’s Studies is a global undertaking. It began almost simultaneously around the world. Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea began its first Women’s Studies program in 1977. In the United States, Cornell University and California State University—San Diego began Women’s Studies programs in 1969; more generally in the United States, Women’s Studies went from several courses in individual universities across the country late in the 1960s to more than 600 degree granting majors and programs today. India established vigorous Women’s Studies research early in the 1970s and became one of the most active countries in the world to investigate women’s experience and thought. Even this phenomenal growth hardly captures the energy that continues to motivate those in Women’s Studies.

The founding of Women’s Studies was full of drama, as the enthusiasm of the first students and teachers met with disapproval from the male university establishment in the West. Some non-Western governments pushed for Women’s Studies programs as part of their new-found independence from imperial control. The 1970s and 1980s saw women at the global grassroots challenging established dictators. At the time, celebrated Western intellectuals in socio-biology and anthropology were asserting women’s biological and intellectual inferiority as scientific fact. They pointed, in contrast, to the risk-taking and intellectual originality of men. Women’s Studies was a fad, other naysayers claimed, and one without the slightest intellectual merit. The field was simply gynecological politics, according to many. Yet, after several millennia of women’s being seen as simply unworthy of consideration, Women’s Studies inquiry emerged to take the innovative path that it still pursues today.

WOMEN’S STUDIES: WHAT IS IT?

Women’s Studies is not exactly new. Despite public and professional neglect, for centuries there have been histories of women, anthologies of women’s literary writing, statistical and sociological studies of such topics as the working conditions of women and the organization of family life. The African oral history tradition had long celebrated noble, accomplished women. Written studies from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries that included women were mostly produced by amateurs. They often found appreciative women readers and even received praise male commentators. Yet not everyone applauded. Consider the case of Lucy Maynard Salmon who taught an early form of Women’s Studies at Vassar College until the 1920s. Salmon had trained with the great scholars of her day, including Woodrow Wilson, who would become US president in 1913. Salmon’s master’s thesis on the appointing powers of American presidents won a national prize. After that, however, professional scholars disapproved when she began writing about domestic service, kitchens, cookbooks, and outdoor museums that displayed farm houses and household tools. She was interdisciplinary and used methods that historians, art historians, sociologists, and others use today in their study of women. At the time, however, young male teachers tried to get her fired from her post as department chair even as others began adopting some of her methods. Salmon was an unsung pioneer in Women’s Studies, inspiring methodological creativity.

In the late 1960s, some half a century after Salmon’s retirement, individual courses took shape in Canada, Great Britain, the United States, India, and elsewhere around the world to investigate women’s literature, history, and psychology and to look at them through the lens of the professional lens of sociology, economics, and politics. Scholars probed their disciplines for evidence on women and came up with astonishing material such as criminal and work records, diaries and account books, reports on fertility, health, and activism. What was most astonishing is that disciplines had almost unanimously claimed no such evidence existed and that studies of women in most fields were impossible because traces of their existence simply did not exist. We know the outcome: essays, anthologies, monographs, novels, and ultimately reference works came rolling off the presses; databases and online bibliographies came into being; encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries produced millions of words and multiple volumes, all of them testifying to the infinite amount of facts, works of art, writing, scientific material, and philosophical thought by women. Hundreds of thousands of books sold, and within a few years Women’s Studies was thriving.

Almost immediately, the new Women’s Studies curriculum of the 1970s galvanized teachers in individual disciplines to mainstream this new information—that is, to add it to the content of regular courses. The floodgates of knowledge opened. At the beginning, Women’s Studies came to offer a cafeteria-like array of disciplinary investigations of the past and present conditions under which women experienced, acted, and reflected upon the world. Initially the field mounted courses in women in the arts, the sociology of women and sex roles, women in politics, and the history of women—to name a few of the offerings. Such courses were revolutionary simply because they explicitly brought the study of women into an academic curriculum that was almost exclusively about men. There came to be more to the field of Women’s Studies—in fact, much, much more. This book presents some of yesterday’s and many of today’s concerns and achievements.

Created as a comprehensive field, programs in Women’s Studies attract tens of thousands of students worldwide, and these students come from every conceivable discipline. In my own Women’s Studies courses, women, trans individuals, and men from psychology, social work, education, engineering, the sciences, and literature make the classroom a lively place as they share expertise and debate ideas with other students from history, the arts, and politics, all sharing wildly different points of view. From the beginning Women’s Studies engaged those who were the most intellectually adventurous, whether the course took place in Seoul, South Korea or Los Angeles, United States. In short, Women’s Studies is a global scholarly enterprise with sparks of energy crossing the disciplines and building varied communities of students and teachers. All this makes Women’s Studies an exciting and innovative program of study.

It is hard to recapture the ignorance of women’s achievements that existed in those days when Women’s Studies was founded. Many of us, for example, could not name five notable women from the past or five major women authors. We were utterly ignorant of women’s major role in activism—whether political or economic. The 1970s was Women’s Studies’ “age of discovery.” Whereas some fields of study such as philosophy go back millennia, it was only recently that Women’s Studies came into being as a coherent program. Often they began with experts in history and literature, who re-educated themselves to investigate women. Sometimes pioneers in sociology and literature team-taught to bring a comparative perspective to their initial study of women. They looked for exemplary and forgotten women writers or women actors in historical events such as revolutions and strikes. Women’s Studies also focused on social scientific investigation of women in the workforce or the underground economy or women in political parties—but again, with many instructors building their own expertise. The idea behind social scientific investigation was to uncover structures, create models, or to discover the ways in which social roles operated and were created. Ignorance among academics on issues such as gender inequity in the workforce was phenomenal—although women in trade unions were all too aware. Behind such investigations there was often an urgency to remedy what was seen as discrimination and the “oppression” of women through fact-finding.

Over the decades Women’s Studies has changed from an initial cluster of fledgling courses springing up in a few colleges and universities to populous programs with majors and graduate curricula. Whereas Women’s Studies started in undergraduate education, new findings entered elementary and high schools, transforming the curriculum. Feminists criticized the ordinary curricula in schools for the complete lack of information on women. They also blamed schools for fostering traditional sex roles, which gave young girls the idea that they only had one course in their lives: to be a wife and mother. Women’s Studies showed options in the many contributions that women had made to society and the many ways in which they had made those contributions. Women’s Studies investigations also gave hard evidence of the bias toward boys and young men in education. For example, they received more feedback when they talked in class and were said to be “brilliant” whereas girls and young women were characterized as “hard-working.” Additional scholarship by Women’s Studies researchers in the 1970s showed that in schools an essay with a boy’s name attached to it consistently received a higher grade than an identical essay with a girl’s name attached—a fact that remains true today. Women’s Studies findings sparked attempts to even the playing field for girls and young women as they progressed through the curriculum. The 1970s became an eye-opening time for everyone concerned with fairness, citizenship, and equal opportunity.

Along the way, Women’s Studies itself changed in its content and even its personnel, as we will see in the chapters that follow. Soon after cobbling together a curriculum of individual courses from the disciplines, Women’s Studies brought the various forms of inquiry under one umbrella and asked that the individual forms of inquiry join in working with others. From a cluster of courses, Women’s Studies became an international phenomenon with journals published and read internationally and with a subject matter in constant evolution. From a program that sometimes did not want male students, it found itself engaging women and men alike in classrooms and in research. It branched out to adult education courses and to technical, law, and business schools. It embraced the study not just of women but of gender. Finally, in some cases Women’s Studies has changed its name and identity over the decades, going from Women’s Studies to Women’s and Gender Studies and sometimes becoming Gender Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or simply Sexuality Studies. Women’s Studies multiplied and became diverse, highlighting variety in national and international meetings and associations. This evolving, sometimes contested, identity will be traced in the chapters of this book.

FEMINIST ROOTS OF WOMEN’S STUDIES: A BRIEF LOOK BACK

As we may know, the late 1960s and 1970s in the West were the heyday of what is sometimes called “second wave feminism.” There was noisy activism around the world for equal pay, control of women’s reproduction, an end to violence against women, and women’s under-representation in politics and public affairs as elected officials. Women also wanted access to good jobs and an end to discrimination in the workforce. Many countries were concerned with women’s poverty, women’s brutalization in the household, and sexual abuse not only of women but of girls and boys. This list of concerns was long and the activism earnest and sincere. In some cases, the problems were so glaring that governments found themselves forced to pay attention and even change policies both to protect and to advance the well-being of women.

Before this activism came the “first feminist wave,” which occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when women around the world organized to gain basic rights such as the right to own property (including the wages they earned), to receive an education, to appear as witnesses in court, to bring suits against aggressors, and to have the same political rights men, such as the vote. During the “first wave,” many women became avid readers of novels and their own histories. They participated in clubs, discussion groups, and politics. Women in Egypt, India, and other colonized countries sought reforms not only for their own sake but to show that their countries were as modern as the imperial powers. In 1905, one Bengali woman, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, wrote a short story, “Sultana’s Dream,” describing how very advanced her country would be if women ruled: gone was deadly warfare. Instead the women rulers of “Ladyland” defeated the nation’s enemies by harnessing the sun’s powers to drive them back; in Hossain’s world there was technological efficiency and, because of it, harmonious rule. Many men in nationalist movements, including Hossain’s husband, supported women’s efforts because they too saw an improved status of women as making a strong statement about the nation’s fitness for self-rule.

In the long run, World War I (1914–1918) brought the vote to many women in the West (though not in populous European states such as Italy and France). After 1945, full independence for countries such as Vietnam and Egypt, where women had played major activist roles in anti-imperialist movements, resulted in few specific advances for women. The goal of independence meant everything—including a sense of belonging—and it took energy and funds to nation-build. For many women the goal of equality was a distant dream and they contented themselves with freedom. Likewise, in the West, the vote hardly brought permanent improvement in conditions for women. Instead, “first wave feminism” seemed to weaken as a public phenomenon. Yet, union women and civil service workers kept agitating for fair wages in the 1940s and 1950s while gay and lesbian activists lobbied quietly for basic human rights.

There was additional movement below the surface. Research and writing about women’s literature and women’s history continued, and “liberated” women around the world loved reading such works in translation as John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women, which boldly advocated for women’s equality and rights. In 1926, Arthur Waley published a translation of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century classic of men, women, and court life in Japan. American author Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) was translated into more than thirty languages, while Chinese novelist Pa Chin’s Family—filled with oppressed women characters—was equally read worldwide. There were, most importantly, women’s periodicals around the world that published researched articles full of statistics on their status in the economy and society. Magazines for housewives showed women being informed mothers and rational household managers—that is, “new” or “modern” women. Activism as some women lobbied against Apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in India, and culture laid additional building blocks for the rise of Women’s Studies around the world.

WOMEN’S STUDIES AND THE UNIVERSITY

Although “first wave” feminism helped some women enter higher education and become professionals in the social sciences, history, and literature, their numbers were small. When the second wave of women’s activism began in the 1960s, a new emphasis on education was already taking place, as societies became “post-industrial.” That is, breakthroughs in science and technology showed the need for a knowledge-based society. As a result, new universities and technical schools sprang up overnight and existing universities expanded both in numbers of students and in the variety of their offerings. One accomplishment of the “second wave” was to mount a clear and surprisingly successful assault on the male domination of higher education even as it engaged in this expansion. “Women’s studies grew out of the recognition of the gross inequities in women’s lived realities,” one South Korean researcher explained, “and through an accumulation of academic knowledge from across the disciplines exploring these problems.”¹ From the 1970s on the number of women students in universities began slowly outnumbering men. Some critics charged that such statistics showed the neglect of men and boys and the discrimination they—not women—faced. The truth of the matter was that women then and today understand that they need to get a university diploma simply to match the wages of a man who has graduated from high school.

Male domination of higher education continues, but the presence of women as professors has made for change. It’s not that there were no women professors before the “second wave” and the creation of Women’s Studies. A small number of women professors had served in universities for centuries, for example as professors of chemistry and math in eighteenth-century Italy. The important point is that Women’s Studies and the feminist movement changed the consciousness of many women and men in academe to recognize the vast problem of discrimination in education. This discrimination existed in the number, salaries, and status of women in universities. There was also a laser-like focus on the consistent privileging of men in the curriculum and classroom. Women’s Studies and its feminist advocates awakened awareness of this fact.

Women’s Studies programs spawned many offspring. There are now centers for women’s leadership, women in politics, the study of sexuality, queer, trans, and lesbian studies, women and race, and many others. Women’s research centers also flourish and many of these reach out within and outside of regions. There are cooperative ventures for publishing in the East Asian region, for example, that come out of Women’s Studies. Many of these have included programs for global cooperation: for example, Rutgers University houses a Center for Women’s Global Leadership, from which programs with worldwide resonance and to which ideas from women around the globe flow. Such offshoots of Women’s Studies add to the changing profile of the university.

WOMEN’S STUDIES GROWS FROM KNOWLEDGE OUTSIDE THE ACADEMY

Women’s Studies was born alongside the women’s movement and prospered with a fruitful interaction between amateurs outside the academy and professionals within it. Beyond the academy, activists were founding magazines such as Ms., publishing about women in the women’s press, and starting their own publishing houses such as the Feminist Press in New York, the Des Femmes press in Paris, and Kali for Women in New Delhi. These institutions sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The invention of women’s studies
• 2 The foundations of interdisciplinarity
• 3 Intersectionality and difference: race, class, and gender
• 4 Global agendas
• 5 Violence, militarization, security, and peace
• 6 Women’s studies and the question of gender
• 7 Feminist theories and methods
• 8 Embodiment, sexuality, identity
• 9 Classrooms, controversies, and citizenship
• 10 The future of women’s studies in our information age
• Index