Letters to the Editor
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from a professor in a Women's Studies department
There are so many assumptions flying around in the responses that it's hard to know where to begin. First, the idea that the disciplines function as coherent "bodies of knowledge" is a fantasy. Disciplines do not function in this manner, because scholarly networks that produce scholarship are already interdisciplinary. Departments are merely convenient units for academic bureaucracy; they have nothing to do with the way scholarship actually works. Each form that Women's Studies takes in universities--whether it is a major or minor and whether it is an autonomous free-standing department or a program in which faculty members share time with departments--is not a product of any "ideology." It's a product of the local conditions that give rise to the demand for courses in the study of women or gender.
I know less about Britain, but the U.S. university system is large and extremely diverse; it's impossible to generalize about women's studies departments.
Within Women's Studies itself there are debates about what institutional form is best, for whom, and under what conditions. That said, the idea that Women's Studies departments are dying is silly. I teach in one, and our enrollments are up every semester. Our major numbers are up. We have male students who enroll in courses and major in Women's Studies. They don't come out saying that we indoctrinate students. In fact, our students, find the job market as challenging as other college graduates--no more, and no less. We have graduated students who go to law school, medical school, work in Hollywood as screen writers, go into Social Work, run their own businesses, go into the Peace Corps, go to graduate school, work for battered women's shelters, become grant writers.
Research shows that fields in which students major have nothing to do with their first job after getting their college degree. The fact that some students are interested in Women's Studies does not mean they are innocent lambs waiting to be indoctrinated (after all the average incoming age of a college student today is not 18 but much older--in loco parentis seems an odd model for faculty-student relations given the reality of "life-long learning."). Christine Summers is entitled to her point of view, but readers are not entitled to assume she is right without reading more arguments that counter her's. After all, isn't learning about struggling with contending views, sifting through their evidence, and then deciding after a process of inquiry, what is truthful?
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Gainfully Employed WoSt Undergrad
When I was first out of college, an interviewer told me, as he looked over my resume, that a women's studies major was, in his view, a trendy option for women who don't know what else to do. Which may have been an opinion to suit his previous experiences, but didn't have much to do with me, as I had a second major (English) and a minor (history) and years of internship and extra-curricular experience relating directly to the industry I was trying to break into. Of all the things one could say about me, cluelessness wasn't one of them. I don't think this man was alone in applying his own ideas of the discipline without integrating the information in front of him. (People I knew who graduated with African-American studies degrees had it much worse.)
That said, of course there are plenty of valid criticisms for women’s studies, which is a very new discipline and has changed a lot to meet changing thought, especially in comparison to most academic fields. Women's studies is still defining itself and defining its cannon. Even the name, women's studies, has become outdated in many schools. (I actually graduated with Gender and Women's Studies--GAWS.)
As to employable skills, I hadn't realized that liberal arts students gain those from the subjects in which they take their degrees. I certainly don't think history or English were all that much more practical than WoSt. What I took away was much the same from each--reading, writing, and thinking critically.
I also don't believe that I was forced into a political stance any less than other disciplines do to their students. Sure, in economics one does learn about both Keynes and Marx, but, one is expected to have an opinion before one graduates. Which was my experience with WoSt. I found it much harder, actually, to express a dissenting view point in history classes, go figure.
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Huh?
"Research shows that fields in which students major have nothing to do with their first job after getting their college degree."
I'm guessing that few students who majored in Womyns' Studies were hired as engineers or accountants out of college.
You may be a good teacher, I'll give you respect for that. But the perception of the discipline on Main Street as being controlled by old-guard radicals didn't just spring fully grown from the head of Zeus (or Hera, I guess). The fact that WS claims itself a "discipline" by its nature politicizes it in a way that history, sociology and others are not. For example, as one poster here previously stated, nobody in WS suggests that there are limitations of any sort on women, whether they relate to leadership, work, family, or anything else (save perhaps Paglia, who considers herself a maverick and others consider outside the fold). Ideas like that are off the table to even consider, because of the tautological outlook of the field. It would no more be considered a valid topic of discussion in most WS departments than a Liberty University professor challenging the divinity of Christ. It ain't happening.
As a grad student I took a class taught by a WS-type feminist who taught as an historian--"Womens' History". It was a great class, and taught me quite a few things that broadened my understanding of the period as it related to women's social status. But when one embraces WS as a major, as something to specialize in for its own sake, the overall objectivity of the student has to be questioned.
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WS in American Universities
There are a lot of posts stating that WS can be studied in any other department or departments. But that would mean only a very limited approach to the subject. In other words, gender questions would either be studied as literary questions, or sociological, legal, etc. WS allows an interdisciplinary approach to this.
Another way of thinking of this is through the example of less "ideological" or "political" approaches. For example, my university has Renaissance Studies and Medieval Studies, should these be dismantled because it is something that can be studied in a variety of fields? How would you reconcile an archeological approach to the Renaissance vs a literary approach to it?
Also, I think a lot of posts are collapsing the difference between the idea of majors and minors at the undergraduate level and the structure of graduate studies. A WS major would have also taken a wide array of courses in other areas and disciplines. On the other hand, at the graduate level, there is no, at least not usually, a WS department but only academic programs that serve as a intellectual meeting place of like minded scholars--women´s studies, hellenistic studies, Latin American studies, etc.