ABSTRACT
At first Women’s Studies was a collection of subject matter from discrete disciplines, each contributing a literature, sociology, history, or psychology course from a scholar whose expertise came from outside Women’s Studies. This was natural because scholars were trained to work in this way and students were only offered courses in traditional disciplines. Departments would free up these scholars to lend an individual course-say, one from sociology on women and sex roles or from economics on women in the economy-to make up a Women’s Studies curriculum. Another course might look at famous women authors or famous women in politics or music. The possibilities were and remain endless for courses about women in religion, the arts, or philosophy. Researchers in Women’s Studies followed the same pursuit of new knowledge for courses from within their individual disciplines out of a strong urge to expand the knowledge base of those fields. The idea for these researchers was that individual disciplines would soon come to incorporate the study of women, as a result of the massive rethinking. However, Women’s Studies went far beyond that. All these individual courses, such as women in history or women
and science, still exist, but gradually there was experimentation: literature and history teachers offered team-taught courses, for example, while social scientists brought together information in a course
combining knowledge of women in government, politics, and the economy, for instance. So, in the early days and even today, Women’s Studies was and can be an array of courses about women coming from the individual disciplines in the university and more or less sandwiched together. A course in women and literature will come from the English or comparative literature departments with perhaps a psychologist or sociologist on board, while one on women and Buddhism will be offered by a scholar in the department of religion teaching with a historian. What happened in the early days of Women’s Studies has often been called “multidisciplinarity” rather than true interdisciplinarity.
