Women's Studies

WOMEN’S STUDIES. The Hunter College Women’s Studies Collective explained: “Women’s Studies is not simply the study of women, it is the study of women which places women’s own experiences in the center of the process. It examines the world and the human beings who inhabit it with questions, analyses, and theories built directly on women’s experiences.” As an academic field, women’s studies developed alongside not only the women’s liberation movement but also the civil rights, anti-war, and student movements of the late 1960s. Although women’s studies soon widened to encompass many perspectives, its pioneering scholars represented the radical sector of the academy.

The emerging interdisciplinary field gathered young faculty and graduate students who viewed scholarly work as incontestably political and anti-establishment. As anthropologist Elizabeth Kapovsky Kennedy noted, the social movements of the 1960s “profoundly shaped the form and content of its curriculum.” “People ask if we thought about race and class in those days,” literary scholar Josephine Donavan recalled. “That’s all we thought about: racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Feminism added gender to the mix.”

By the late 1960s women’s studies courses, mainly in the liberal arts, were taught on college campuses, and the numbers grew at such a rate that the first undergraduate majors were soon taking shape. The first formal program was established in 1970 at San Diego State University. By the decade’s end, programs in women’s studies totaled approximately 350. Specialized journals appeared, such as Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies, Signs, Frontiers, and the Women’s Studies Newsletter. The National Women’s Studies Association formed in 1977, and by the early 1980s its annual meetings drew between one thousand and two thousand participants. The major professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Association, Modern Languages Association, and American Historical Association, housed feminist or women’s caucuses by the mid-1980s. In 1985, Dissertation Abstracts International listed more than 13,000 titles.

Although feminist scholars began in the late 1960s by criticizing the male bias of contemporary disciplinary literature, a sizable sector turned to study the origins and nature of women’s oppression and asked questions concerning women’s historical agency. Drawing on older works, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Mary Ritter Beard’s Woman as Force in History (1946), or Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), they came upon an earlier scholarly tradition influenced by historical materialism. Feminist anthropologists, sociologists, and historians in particular centered their initial analyses on the sexual division of labor in its specific cultural and historic forms as a guide to understanding the status of women and the relations between the sexes.

A groundbreaking contribution was Margaret Benston’s essay “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” which appeared in Monthly Review in 1969. Employing Marxist terminology, Benston analyzed women’s oppression as a function of their particular place in capitalist production, namely their assignment to the production of use-value in the home. Because the value of domestic work remains unrecognized in a capitalist economy, she argued, women carry the stigma of their distance from commodity production. Although Benston’s specific analysis suffered a series of criticisms, her demonstration of the connections between women, the family, and the larger society inspired other scholars to make the study of political economy an important facet of their work.

This framework stood out in the early scholarship in the field of anthropology and especially so in the work of Michelle Rosaldo. Although Rosaldo discarded Engels’s dictum that women’s subordination occurred only with the institution of private property in favor of a theory of universal female subordination, she nevertheless took a materialist approach. Rosaldo studied social and cultural organization as a function of the sexual division of labor and reasoned that women’s reproductive function and responsibility led to a “differentiation of domestic and public spheres of activity.” Women’s oppression and agency depended, in Rosaldo’s analysis, on the degree of “sexual asymmetry.”

The concept of distinct “spheres,” structural divisions by private and public, showed itself prominently in early feminist scholarship in the field of history. In the influential essay “The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” published in 1976, Joan Kelly (1928–1982) speculated that when the differentiation between family and society was minimal, women’s status more nearly approximated that of men; when there was a sharp break between the private and public spheres, sexual inequality increased. The historical scholarship of the early 1970s incorporated this line of argument, which generated in turn a major subfield, women’s labor history. Shop-floor studies in trades with high rates of female participation, analyses of women’s role in specific strikes and unions, and new perspective on the significance of women’s domestic labor, all highlighted a challenge made by women scholars to traditional as well as Left labor historiography.

Feminist scholars, Rosaldo and Kelly among the most articulate, did not, however, simply transpose the materially determinist frameworks of earlier generations onto their own work. They insisted that sex, class, and race were coequally integral and interactive concepts.

Outside the social sciences, the influence of the Left has been more circuitous. Feminist literary criticism began in the late 1960s by criticizing the canon for its virtual exclusion of women writers and exposing the misogynist handling of female characters by male authors. Scholars proceeded to uncover a lost tradition of women writers, the Feminist Press under Florence Howe’s leadership in the 1970s playing the leading role in reprinting primary sources.

By the mid-1980s an entirely different approach had taken over the field. In a loose combination of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, many scholars proposed new lines of interpretation. The historical materialist approach yielded to theories of representation that highlighted the ambiguity of the text in light of the triumph and subsequent fragmentation of Western thought. In many programs, terminology reflected these new impulses in the common renaming to “gender studies” or “gender and sexualities studies.”

At the same time, educators and scholars responded to the new social movements coming to the fore in the late 1980s and gaining influence into the twenty-first century, many organized to advocate diversity foremost. Women’s studies became a major home of multiculturalism, transnational, and intersectionality. The disciplinary leadership of history and literature characteristic of the early scholarship faded to various theoretical perspectives that emphasized the diversity and complexity of human society, some grounded in Marxism, others not. By 2020, social justice, especially as related to people of color, returned as a primary element in research and teaching. At the time, the National Women’s Studies Association claimed more than 3,000 members and 350 institutional affiliations.

Du Bois, Ellen Carol, Gail Paradise Kelly, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, and Lillian S. Robinson. Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Howe, Florence, editor. The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2000.

Hunter College Women’s Studies Collective. Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices: An Introduction to Women’s Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.