Women's Studies: A Brief History of the Field

           
Women's studies is a field of inquiry that grew from a concern about the way other academic fields ignored or distorted the concerns, histories, theories, experiences, and perspectives of women. Women's studies scholars, with many different points of interest and with many different methods of conducting research, seek to understand the causes, workings, and effects of power inequalities in societies past and present. These power inequities have affected the kinds of claims a male-dominated academy has made about women as well as the lives and opportunities of women and men. Women's studies grew out of the women's movement in the 1970s, when many committed professors and students began to address the sexism they saw in the academy by volunteering to organize courses, forums, and conferences.

Eventually women's studies was institutionalized into thriving academic programs across the country. Today over 600 women's studies programs offer minors, majors, and even graduate degrees. (See our "links" page on this website for information on the national professional organization, the NWSA, and the many academic journals to which women's studies scholars contribute.) The field of women's studies, then, is closely aligned with the overall project of achieving equality for women in society. That commitment to social change makes women's studies scholarship feminist and links it to social movements across the world to end forms of discrimination such as sexism, racism, and heterosexism.

Women's studies, like so many other fields of scholarly inquiry, contains almost as many specific topics as there are women's studies scholars. Researchers may be interested in topics such as literature, film, performance art, medicine, technology, work, sexuality, aging, racism, the family, and education. They may also be interested in combining topics-for example, studying women's work in the family, women's work in the film industry, or the way female sexuality is shaped and understood as new medical technologies emerge. Women's studies is a broad, multidisciplinary field.
Women's studies professors, like their colleagues in other fields, play many roles that help them explore the topics that interest them most. These roles can be combined under the following headings:

• Learners: Studying the ways in which women's studies views both the world and the results of feminist academic work

• Researchers: Reading, working with, and using other research and data

• Participants: Applying feminist scholarship in the real world, using scholarship to make a positive change for a more just society, and interacting with other feminist scholars

• Teachers: Sharing their knowledge with other scholars, relevant organizations, and students

National Women's Studies Association (NWSA)

NWSA Mission (from www.nwsa.org)

NWSA is committed to the development of scholarship and research that incorporates disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, multicultural, and/or global methods and perspectives to advance the study and knowledge of all women and to create critical dialogue on the production of knowledge about and related to all women and on the application of such knowledge to social and political practices and processes. To that end, we recognize the integral connection among scholarship, activism, and teaching.

NWSA is committed to the creation and growth of women's studies institutional units dedicated to teaching, research, scholarship, and community activism, and especially committed to the efforts of programs and departments to realize the research and scholarship missions of NWSA. In order to meet these goals, NWSA is also committed to a vision of academic work that includes the participation of faculty, students, and community scholars; the exchange of regional scholars; and the presence of community organizations, both locally and globally, engaged in critical reflection and dialogue on the social meaning and use of research, scholarship, and teaching in women's studies more broadly conceived.