The Politics of Women's Studies

Testimony From Thirty Founding Mothers

Plot

In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers. Yet intrepid women--students, faculty, administrators, members of the community--persisted in collaborating to form women's studies. In doing so, they created a movement that altered curricula and teaching styles, and shifted paradigms and content across disciplines. These original essays by "founding mothers" feature a diversity of voices: young graduate students or new PhD's just beginning to teach and untenured; tenured professors in search of ways to improve their students' capacities to learn; older, veteran academics at last witnessing change; and even a few administrators. In all of these programs, founders grappled not only with issues of gender, but with those of class, race, and sexuality, in a decade infused with political unrest and questioning, when civil rights and anti-war activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds.

pt. 1. Naming the problem: the absence of women from the curriculum and scholarship. Learning from teaching / Florence Howe ; Teaching across the boundaries of race and class / Nancy Hoffman ; Beginning in the 1960s / Sheila Tobias ; The evolution of a consortial women's studies program / Jean Walton
pt. 2. Overcoming barriers: ridicule, reluctance, and refusals. The gender revolution / Nancy Topping Bazin ; Moving from the periphery to the center / Barbara W. Gerber ; Imploding marginality / Annis Pratt ; A cause of our own / Josephine Donovan ; An odyssey / Inez Martinez
pt. 3. Inventing successful strategies: the power of groups, planning and publicity. The deodorant of success / Mimi Reisel Gladstein ; The women's studies moment: 1972 / Kathryn Kish Sklar ; From the bottom up: the students' initiative / Gloria Bowles ; The academy and the activist: collective practice and multicultural focus / Margaret Strobel ; Awakening / Mary Anne Ferguson
pt. 4. Providing feminist scholarship for texts, teaching and other scholars. "What women writers?": plotting women's studies in New York / Electa Arenal ; Building Black women's studies / Barbara Smith ; Charting a personal journey: a road to women's studies / Nellie Y. McKay ; Other mothers of women's studies / Beverly Guy-Sheftall
pt. 5. Building women's studies programs: no easy task anywhere. Modern woman not lost / Marilyn Boxer ; Dreams of social justice / Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy ; Changing signs / Tucker Pamella Farley ; A sense of discovery, mixed with a sense of justice / Annette Kolodny ; A political education / Myra Dinnerstein ; Has it really been thirty years? / Sue-Ellen Jacobs ; Linking ethnic studies to women's studies / Yolanda T. Moses
pt. 6. Looking Back: cups half empty or half full? The long road through gendered questions / Johnetta B. Cole ; Making a place / Nona Glazer ; The ground revisited / Nancy Porter ; There were godmothers, too / Mariam K. Chamberlain