By Kendall Anderson
Minnesota Women’s Press
Founded in the late ’60s, the academic discipline of women’s studies has now expanded to include gender and sexuality studies as well as racism, environmental equity and peace studies. With all these changes … is women’s studies still relevant?
Boy have we come a long way baby (and girl do we have a long way to go).
That’s what many scholars and graduates think about women’s studies, the multidisciplinary field that sprang from the women’s movement of the 1960s. Founded and nurtured amid social activism and rampant gender discrimination in the late 1960s, women’s studies programs are now offered at more than 700 U.S. colleges and universities. The discipline’s success has also brought challenges, among them the everlasting question of relevance. There is a lack of knowledge among some students about the discipline, scholars say.
“Female students today have so many opportunities: Their mothers work, they’ve seen female senators and maybe, soon, a female president, so they think the women’s movement is done,” said Prof. Joanne Cavallaro, chair of women’s studies at the College of St. Catherine. She pointed out that though white middle-class American women have more opportunities, “If you look at the statistics around the world on women, that’s obviously not true.”
Nearly four decades after it was founded, women’s studies is undergoing a kind of redefinition, said Jacquelyn N. Zita, an associate professor in women’s studies and former department chair at the University of Minnesota. Along with proving the field’s relevance to students who sometimes lack historical perspective, Zita and others work to keep society at large educated about what a feminist lens can bring to our complex issues of the day. Both goals must be accomplished at the same time women’s studies leaders protect their programs and grow their historically low funding in an increasingly competitive academic world.