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What is Women’s Studies?

Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, the field of Women’s Studies has investigated the systems of gender, power, and representation that shape the lives of women and men, girls and boys. As an interdisciplinary field of study, Women’s Studies’ scholarship puts gender—what it means to be male or female, masculine or feminine—at the center of analysis. It asks such questions as: How does one’s gender affect participation in the family, economy, politics, and the arts? How do language, ideology, and visual representation convey meanings about women’s and men’s status in society? How has that status changed historically? How does the experience of gender vary according to one’s race, class, nationality, religion, and sexual identity?

Questions like these—about the experiences of women and gendered systems of power—have motivated an extensive body of scholarship and classroom practices that aim to enact an inclusive, democratic, feminist vision of the future.

What’s the Point of Women’s Studies?

What’s the point of Women’s Studies? After all, the media routinely proclaim that women’s rights have been achieved and that feminism is dead.

But is this reality?

Let’s just look at one issue: standard of living. On average, white women still earn only 70% of the earnings of white men. African American, Native American, and Hispanic women earn 62%, 58%, and 52%, respectively, of what white men make, demonstrating the double jeopardy involved in discrimination against both race and gender.

Within the U.S., the numbers of women and children living in poverty is staggering. According to the Census Bureau, 1.7 million more people were classified as living below the poverty line in 2002 than during the previous year. The situation is particularly dire for single mothers. Although only 20% of all families are headed by single mothers, half of the families living in poverty are headed by them. And racial disparities cry out for attention: whereas 9% of white women live in poverty, more than 20% of African American, Native American, and Hispanic women live under the poverty line.

Likewise, once one begins to look outside the U.S. to the global realities that disproportionately affect women—poverty and hunger, the HIV epidemic, rape as a weapon of war and terror, and educational and political disenfranchisement—one becomes mindful of how much work on behalf of women around the world remains to be done.

It is the job of Women’s Studies to open our eyes to this and other realities—at home and around the globe. It does so not only by demonstrating the forms of discrimination that persist, but providing frameworks for analyzing how discrimination comes about and why it continues. Perhaps most importantly, Women’s Studies helps us to understand the ways in which women have actively resisted inequality, both in past societies and today.

Through its interdisciplinary orientation linking the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, and the health sciences, Women’s Studies enables women and men to work together to promote social justice.

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