The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers

In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers. Yet intrepid women--students, faculty, administrators, members of the community--persisted in collaborating to form women's studies. In doing so, they created a movement that altered ...In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers.

Yet intrepid women--students, faculty, administrators, members of the community--persisted in collaborating to form women's studies. In doing so, they created a movement that altered curricula and teaching styles, and shifted paradigms and content across disciplines. These original essays by "founding mothers" feature a diversity of voices: young graduate students or new PhD's just beginning to teach and untenured; tenured professors in search of ways to improve their students' capacities to learn; older, veteran academics at last witnessing change; and even a few administrators.

In all of these programs, founders grappled not only with issues of gender, but with those of class, race, and sexuality, in a decade infused with political unrest and questioning, when civil rights and anti-war activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds.