Ebook: 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 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 Ph.D.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. During the early years, they taught at more than 30 campuses, many changing jobs several times. Some taught at private institutions such as Spelman College and Cornell University, while the majority taught at large state universities such as Berkeley, Michigan, Kentucky, Arizona, and the City University of New York. 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 antiwar activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds. In engaging political memoir, these essays chronicle the exhilaration of building a new kind of institution, of constructing a new curriculum and unearthing a new body of knowledge. They also give voice to the pain of successive defeats in the face of sexist attitudes and structures. Few of these trailblazers were welcomed as agents of change, fewer still applauded for their work. Yet their stories remain both inspiring and instructive. While each of these women's narratives has a life of its own, collectively, they tell an even more powerful story.

The first volume in the Women's Studies History series, The Politics of Women's Studies preserves an essential history that is in danger of sinking into obscurity, combatting the amnesia afflicting many of those teaching and studying about women today. The Politics of Women's Studies includes essays by: Electa Arenal, Gloria Bowles, Marilyn J. Boxer, Mariam Chamberlain, Johnnetta Cole, Nona Glazer, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Nancy Hoffman, Elizabeth Kennedy, Annette Kolodny, Nellie McKay, Yolanda Moses, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Barbara Smith, Sheila Tobias, and others.