A reader named Fred kindly sends me a link to this Times Online story that ran a couple of weeks ago: Last women standing. According to Esther Oxford (love the name), Women’s Studies as a discipline is on the decline in the United Kingdom:
…the UK’s last stand-alone undergraduate degree in women’s studies, London Metropolitan used to have places for 35 undergraduates on the course. But in 2005, it stopped accepting new students.
It is all a far cry from the heyday for women’s studies in the late Eighties and early Nineties. In the past two decades, departments across Britain have been forced to integrate into other departments or to close outright. Only MAs and PhDs appear to be surviving the cull.
One problem has been the sustained attack on women’s studies as a “soft” subject appealing to fringe elements and perpetuating old-fashioned, irrelevant debates. Women and society have moved on, say critics, but women’s studies remains framed by the politics of a particular time, namely the feminist movement of the Seventies.
To be accurate, as the article makes clear, many Women’s Studies programs in Britain (as here in the United States) aren’t disappearing entirely. Instead, they are being folded into the larger discipline of Gender Studies. For example, here in Los Angeles, we see that the number of doctoral programs in Women’s Studies has been halved in the past few years. UCLA still has a Women’s Studies program, while arch-rival USC has a Gender Studies program — which grew out of an older Women’s Studies major. (Both are first rate.) It would be dishonest, however, to suggest that because there are fewer programs using the term “women’s studies” that the subject is on the decline. At some institutions, name changes reflect that the study of sex and society has been broadened and deepened rather than reduced,
(Parenthetically, I note that while I was an undergraduate, the “meteorology” major disappeared and was replaced by “Atmospheric Sciences”. It would have been silly to conclude that folks lost interest in studying weather simply because the nomenclature was altered!)
But the problem in Britain is real:
But if women’s studies is such a fast-moving and powerfully mobilising force, why is it on the verge of extinction? Some argue that reduced demand is a symptom of women’s studies having had its day: feminist-inspired ideas have been absorbed and are now debated within mainstream subjects.
Others argue that studying feminism is seen as an indulgence, an irrelevance for young women who want degrees that lead to jobs.
Stacey and her department at Lancaster did persuade 80 students to sign up to an Introduction to Women’s Studies course, but it wasn’t enough to save the Institute of Women’s Studies from closure. She says the truth was that vice-chancellors do not think small units are economically sustainable.
Anne-Marie Fortier, who heads the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies within the sociology department at Lancaster, agrees. Women’s studies departments can have excellent research ratings, libraries and scholarships. But it makes no difference – to vice-chancellors or students.
“Most students don’t even know what a six-star rating means. They just want to know how much coursework they will get and what kind of career options there are,” she says.
Every time I feel like complaining about my college and my salary, I think about higher education in the UK and breathe a sigh of relief. I have tenure, after all, something that has all but disappeared from the mother country. And as bad as our funding problems are here in California, we don’t close down entire disciplines at the whim of vice-chancellors!
The article points to one of the great debates in Women’s Studies since its inception. Are the courses we teach designed to be ameliorative, to provide alternatives to the male-centered curricula? If so, what happens when we succeed (as we surely want to) in getting feminist ideas absorbed into the “mainstream”? Once we’ve achieved gender parity in the student body (which we have) and among the professoriate (which we haven’t, yet); once we’ve seen the inclusion of feminist perspectives in courses across the disciplines, will there still be a need for a specific discipline called Women’s Studies? Do we sow the seeds of our own destruction by moving in from the margins?
In the USA, at least, the answer seems to be “hell, no!” Though feminist scholarship does seek to shape the content and the perspectives taught throughout the academy, it also remains the only discipline to focus specifically on women. Gender — as it is constructed, taught, performed — is pertinent to how each and every one of us lives in the world. Women’s Studies programs inspired the creation of Men’s Studies. After all, we spend a lot of time studying what great men have done — and very little time looking at masculinity as an idea. These programs weren’t created as temporary measures to encourage the older disciplines to take note of gender issues. As long as our society continues to attach meaning to sexual difference, Gender Studies programs must exist to interpret, analyse, and critique those imposed meanings. Though sociology, history, philosophy and literature departments can and should incorporate feminist ideas into their own particular disciplines, doing so doesn’t make the study of sex and society as a primary subject any less vital for the academy and for the global community.
When I teach my Women’s History class at PCC, I often tell my students that if I had had more courage, I would have pursued my degree in Women’s Studies rather than in medieval church history. (The story of how I ended up getting a Ph.D. in a subject I didn’t love is here). I urge them to be braver than I was. I know plenty of women (and one or two men) who took degrees in Women’s Studies and left academia for the “real world”. They work in publishing, in marketing, in law. Their decision to major in Women’s Studies proved to be no barrier to their success.
I’m happy to say that I regularly get emails (or these days, Facebook messages) from former students of mine who have gone on to get degrees in Women’s or Gender Studies. Some were inspired to major in the subject as a result of taking my class, a thought that makes me tingle with happiness. A couple are in graduate school now in those same fields, and one of these days, one of them may join me as a colleague. I’m reaching the age where I will soon serve on a committee that might hire a former student. At Pasadena City College, at least, Women’s Studies remains a popular subject. And judging by the success of the Gender Studies major at USC and the Women’s Studies major at UCLA, it’s not disappearing from the curriculum at local universities any time soon.
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