ABSTRACT
A curriculum, like a globe, pretends to map reality: it codifies the categories to which the phenomena of life have been provisionally assigned. Women's studies, a term that provokes both confusion and contempt, are an ambitious attempt to alter those categories. Women's studies are but one of several names for a national movement that has neither formal structure nor official bureaucracy. Its other titles include female studies, feminist studies, gender studies, sex role studies and studies in masculinity and femininity. In the spring of 1973, Ford awarded fourteen fellowships in women's studies to faculty members and fifteen fellowships to predoctoral candidates; they intended to make research grants the next year, at least to faculty. The gap between theory and practice clearly reveals the stubbornness of methodological problems more than it does a particular weakness of women's studies itself. Given the magnitude and complexity of the resistance, it is hardly surprising that women's studies are still vulnerable.
