Women's studies


Women's studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppression; and the relationships between power and gender as they intersect with other identities and social locations such as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and disability.
Popular concepts that are related to the field of women's studies include feminist theory, standpoint theory, intersectionality, multiculturalism, transnational feminism, social justice, Matrixial gaze, affect studies, agency, bio-politics, materialism, and embodiment. Research practices and methodologies associated with women's studies include ethnography, autoethnography, focus groups, surveys, community-based research, discourse analysis, and reading practices associated with critical theory, post-structuralism, and queer theory. The field researches and critiques different societal norms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other social inequalities.
Women's studies is related to the fields of gender studies, feminist studies, and sexuality studies, and more broadly related to the fields of cultural studies, ethnic studies, and Africana studies.
Women's studies courses are now offered in over seven hundred institutions in the United States, and globally in more than forty countries.

History

Africa

The erasure of women and their activities in Africa was complex. When women's studies emerged in the 1980s, it focused on recovering women from the obscurity of all of African history caused by colonialism and the "patriarchal social systems" left behind in Africa after decolonization. Because systems prevailed that supported boys' education over that of girls, in the era following independence, there were few women who could read and write. Those who could were not encouraged to become professionals and often resorted to activism to address educational and other disadvantages women faced in the 1960s and 1970s. The first generation of scholars focused on establishing and legitimizing Africa's precolonial history. They also questioned whether the Western construct of gender applied in Africa or whether the concepts of gender existed in pre-colonial Africa.
Ifi Amadiume's work Male Daughters, Female Husbands and Oyeronke Oyewumi's The Invention of Women are some of the first works which sought to examine gender perceptions in Africa. In 1977, the Association of African Women for Research and Development was established to promote research on African women by African women. Scholars affiliated with the organization from its founding included: Simi Afonja, N'Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba,, Nawal El Saadawi, Nina Mba, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, Achola Pala Okeyo, Filomena Steady, Fatou Sow, and Zenebework Tadesse. Other scholars joined Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, a network for feminist academics and activists focused on the Global South, created in 1984. African scholars among DAWN's founding members were Fatema Mernissi, Pala Okeyo, and Marie-Angélique Savané. These scholars inspired a second group of researchers and activists, which included: Rudo Gaidzanwa, Ayesha Imam, Patricia McFadden, Amina Mama, Takyiwaa Manuh, Maria Nzomo, and Charmaine Pereira. The University of Ghana established the Development and Women's Studies Program in 1989, which by 1996 offered both undergraduate and graduate level studies. After the demise of Apartheid, the University of Cape Town, South Africa established the African Gender Institute in 1996 to facilitate research and gender studies in Africa. By 2003, full departments dedicated to gender and women's studies had also been established at Makerere University, the University of Buea, and the University of Zambia.

Americas

The first accredited women's studies course in the U.S. was held in 1969 at Cornell University. After a year of intense organizing of women's consciousness raising groups, rallies, petition circulating, and operating unofficial or experimental classes and presentations before seven committees and assemblies, the first women's studies program in the United States was established in 1970 at San Diego State College. In conjunction with National Women's Liberation Movement, students and community members created the ad hoc committee for women's studies. The second women's studies program in the United States was established in 1971 at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. It was mostly formed through many efforts by women in the English department, administration and within the community. By 1974, San Diego State University faculty members began a nationwide campaign for the integration of the department. At the time, these actions and the field were extremely political. Before formalized departments and programs, many women's studies courses were advertised unofficially around campuses and taught by women faculty members – without pay – in addition to their established teaching and administrative responsibilities. Then, as in many cases today, faculty who teach in women's studies often hold faculty appointments in other departments on campus.
The first scholarly journal in interdisciplinary women's studies, Feminist Studies, began publishing in 1972. The National Women's Studies Association was established in 1977.
In 1977, there were 276 women's studies programs nationwide in the United States. The number of programs increased in the following decade, growing up to 530 programs in 1989, which included the program at the University of Puerto Rico founded by Margarita Benítez in 1986. Around the 1980s, universities in the U.S. saw the growth and development of women's studies courses and programs across the country while the field continued to grapple with backlash from both conservative groups and concerns from those within the women's movement about the white, existentialist, and heterosexual privilege of those in the academy.
In Canada The first few university courses in Women's Studies were taught in the early 1970s. In 1984 the federal government established five regional endowed chairs in Women's Studies for each region of the country at:
Around the same time, women academics in Latin America began to form women's studies groups. The first chair of women's studies in Mexico was created in the political and social sciences faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1970. Starting in 1979, the Grupo Autónomo de Mujeres Universitarias, which included both Mexican faculty and students began meeting periodically to discuss how feminism could be introduced to various campuses across the country. In 1982, a women's studies program was created at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco. Similarly in 1983, activists in the Mexican feminist movement, including Lourdes Arizpe, Flora Botton, and Elena Urrutia, founded the Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la Mujer at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. In 1984, academics formed the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer in the psychology faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The field was formalized with the creation of the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género in 1992, at the urging of academics like Gloria Careaga, Teresita de Barbieri,, Araceli Mingo, Lorenia Parada, and Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte.
Activists and researchers in Chile began meeting in 1978 with creation of the Círculo de la Mujer. In 1984, they founded the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer in Santiago to facilitate multi-disciplinary studies on women and gender. That same year, Virginia Vargas began teaching women's studies in Peru, and the following year, she along with Virginia Guzmán Barcos and others, founded the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center. The center provided a research facility for women scholars and provided publishing for their works. From the early 1980s, women like Juanita Barreto Gama, Guiomar Dueñas Vargas, Florence Thomas, Magdalena León Gómez, María Martínez, Donny Meertens,, María Himelda Ramírez and Ana Rico de Alonso worked to create an interdisciplinary field of feminist study in Colombia. First they met informally, then were able to gain official recognition in 1985 as the Grupo de Estudios Mujer y Sociedad and finally in 1994, they launched the Programa de Estudios de Género, Mujer y Desarrollo in the Human Sciences Department at the National University of Colombia.
In 1985, activists in Argentina launched the "Introduction to Women's Studies" and a post-graduate seminar, "La construcción social del género sexual" at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1987, María Fernández became the chair of UBA's degree program in women's studies. In 1992, the Area Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de la Mujer, which became the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género in 1997, was founded at UBA linking academics from the faculties of Arts, Anthropology, Classics and Letters, Education, History, Languages, and Philosophy to encourage broader research and analysis of women in these fields. Hilda Habichayn founded the Centro de Estudios Históricos sobre las Mujeres, which began in 1993 to offer the first master's degree in women's studies in Latin America.
The first women's study program in Paraguay was the Centro Paraguayo de estudios de la Mujer at the Universidad Católica "Nuestra Señora de la Asunción". It was founded in 1983 by Olga Caballero, Manuelita Escobar, Marilyn Godoy and Edy Irigoitia. The Grupo de Estudios de la Mujer Paraguaya was founded at the Paraguayan Center for Sociological Studies in 1985 by Graziella Corvalán and Mirtha Rivarola.
Gender studies also began to be established in universities in Brazil in the 1980s and continued expanding throughout the 1990s. In 1992, Brazilian academics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro launched Revista Estudos Feministas, one of the primary academic journals on gender in Brazil.
Among the contributors for the inaugural issue were, Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, Maria Carneiro da Cunha,, Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, Valéria Lamego, Miriam Moreira Leite, Leila Linhares, Heleieth Saffioti, Bila Sorj, and others.
The political aims of the feminist movement that compelled the formation of women's studies found itself at odds with the institutionalized academic feminism of the 1990s. As "woman" as a concept continued to be expanded, the exploration of social constructions of gender led to the field's expansion into both gender studies and sexuality studies. The field of women's studies continued to grow during the 1990s and into the 2000s with the expansion of universities offering majors, minors, and certificates in women's studies, gender studies, and feminist studies. The first official PhD program in Women's Studies was established at Emory University in 1990. there were 16 institutions offering a PhD in Women's Studies in the United States. Since then, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Kentucky-Lexington, Stony Brook University, and Oregon State University also introduced a PhD in the field.