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Women’s
Studies 101
Introduction to Women’s Studies
Women’s Studies began in the 1970s as an academic field committed to uncovering
the realities of women’s lives, understanding the nature of women’s
oppression, and charting paths to significant social change. Over
the course of several decades of interdisciplinary women’s studies
scholarship, the scope of the field has both shifted and expanded
considerably. Women’s studies scholars working in and across
the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences have traced
myriad lines of inquiry from those first questions about women to
investigations into the very nature of gender identity; its intersection
with other axes of difference such as class, race, and sexuality;
and its intimate connection with what at first seemed to be unrelated
forms of power, knowledge, and practice. This course introduces the
dynamic and still changing field of women’s studies scholarship.
We will consider the value of gender as an analytic category for
understanding women’s lives and the worlds they inhabit. But
we will also consider the limitations and dangers of an exclusive
focus on gender. The intersections among gender, race, class, and
sexuality in various contexts, past and present, will be central
to our inquiry.. How feminist theory has developed, and how it is
practiced in various local and international contexts, are also
on our agenda for the semester.
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