Women’s Studies 101

Introduction to Women’s Studies

Fall 2001

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.

Elissa Gelfand

219 Ciruti Center

Ext. 2336

egelfand@mtholyoke.edu

Office Hours:

Mon & Wed: 10:00-11:00,

Fri: 11:00-12:00

and by appointment

Harold Garrett-Goodyear

209 Skinner Hall

Ext.2451

hgarrett@mtholyoke.edu

Office Hours:

please call ext. 2377

for appointments

Acknowledgements

We owe much to colleagues in Women’s Studies who offered their syllabi and good counsel as we prepared the present version of “Introduction to Women’s Studies.” Martha Ackmann, Karen Remmler, and Jean Grossholtz are among former instructors whose syllabi and experiences encouraged and enabled us to teach WOST 101 this year. We also benefited from suggestions by Tamara Burk, director of SAW, and we are grateful for her help in training us and group facilitators to make good use of discussion groups this semester. Other members of Women’s Studies, as well as other past instructors of WOST 101, also played a constructive role in fashioning this course. Especially, however, do we owe thanks to Mary Renda, who will surely recognize as her own much, perhaps most, of what follows. The responsibility for this syllabus, however, is fully ours. EG and HGG.

Contact email: hgarrett@mtholoke.edu