Learning from Women’s Studies (original) (raw)

Scholarly Paper The Development and Impact of Women’s Studies In American Higher Education

2014

WOMEN’S STUDIES IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION 2 This historical essay explores the development of women’s studies as a formal discipline in American higher education. Women’s studies pioneers altered higher education in a variety of ways, from fighting to include women in the curriculum in all disciplines to designing courses that specifically addressed the history, lives, and concerns of women.

Weaving Women’s Studies into the Institutional Web: A Case Study

Journal of international women's studies, 2001

Kingsborough Community College [KCC], one of six in the City University of New York [CUNY], a University containing eleven senior colleges, a medical and a law school, and a Graduate Center, is the first and only community college in CUNY to have a Women’s Studies [WS] Program. It took a long, long time to obtain this Program, and it has taken multi-faceted efforts to weave it into Kingsborough’s life in such a way as to (thus far) keep it. Because we believe that WS are particularly important at the community college level, we are sharing the story of the development of KCC’s WS Program in hopes that aspects of it may prove useful to colleagues at community colleges throughout the country.

The Women's Movement: Impact on the Campus and Curriculum. Current Issues in Higher Education, 1978

1978

Two papers discuss changes in college campuses and curricula due to the emergence of women's issues and the movement to resolve them. An essay by Paul tauter, "The Campus," outlines some of the forces on campus making for change in college curriculum and feminist scholarship. These forces are categorized as "pushes" (women as con-umers of education, existing programs providing special services for women, statistical studies of women's progress through education and into careers) and "pulls" (exciting developments and strong interest in feminist scholarship), Florence Hove's "The Curriculum" outlines the history of women's higher education in the United States aLl its effect on the development of curriculum in women's studies. It is noted that women's studies are necessarily interdisciplinary and share the critical elements of general education: in short, they prepare students to make informed, ethical, judgments that allow them to participate in social, political, and cultural life. It is proposed that the strength of women's curriculum grows from the relationship it projects between past and future, thus supporting the true function and responsibility of the university.

The Women's Studies Experience: Impetus for Feminist Activism

Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1994

The impact of women's studies courses on students' feminist activism and related behaviors was assessed through quantitative and qualitative methods. At pretesting, women's studies students (10 classes: 161 women and 18 men) did not report significantly more activism than nonwomen's studies students taught by women's studies faculty (9 classes: 73 women and 48 men) or nonwomen's studies students taught by nonwomen's studies faculty (12 classes: 107 women and 47 men). At posttesting, women's studies students, relative to the comparison students, reported more activism during the semester of evaluation, stronger intentions to engage in future feminist activism, and more important and more positive course-related influences on their personal lives (p < .0001). Since 1970, over 600 women's studies programs have been established in the United States. Women's studies programs challenge sexist, androcentric assumptions, provide information about women that is missing from traditional curricula, and present a feminist perspective in which women are the focus of study. Primary goals of women's studies programs are to develop a feminist consciousness and to bring about an understanding of the political, economic, and social forces that affect the roles of women and men (Lee, 1989; Weiler, 1988). This understanding is expected to lead to increased feminist activism and more egalitarian roles and relation-We thank the teachers at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who graciously allowed us to evaluate their classes and Cathy Giotto for her assistance in data collection.

Feminist scholarship as a vocation

Higher Education, 1990

This analysis examines the emergence of feminist scholarship in the United States, specifically how a cohort of academic women came to challenge and propose revisions for the content and organization of academic knowledge. It is based on in-depth interviews from a larger two-year, multi-site study. The intellectual biographies and career histories enable us to consider how the current organization of knowledge has constrained or facilitated feminist scholars who advocate interdisciplinarity and social change. The analysis uncovers some of the processes by which intentional intellectual communities are formed and sustained within the current systems of disciplinary peer review and academic rewards.