ABSTRACT
I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
(De Vries 1965: 14)
The summer of 1983 was an exciting time for those of us working in women’s studies at the Open University in the United Kingdom (OUUK). For nearly five years we campaigned for, designed, and finally produced the first undergraduate open and distance learning course in women’s studies, which could be studied by anyone anywhere in the UK. For six weeks during July and August, over 600 students (90 percent women and 10 percent men) came, for a week each, to the campus of the University of East Anglia for the intensive residential component of the course. An OUUK women’s studies summer school ran every summer from then until 1999. In 1999 the final cohort – just over 200 students – studied, argued, and enjoyed themselves; and in a different political and educational world, the undergraduate course, and with it the summer school, came to the end of its life.
