ABSTRACT
Since the emergence of women’s studies initiatives in academe in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a steady stream of challenges to the received wisdom of the humanities and social sciences. By placing women at the center of analysis, by asking the simple question “What about women?” researchers revealed the ways in which the grounding assumptions in a variety of disciplines excluded women. In literary studies, history, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology-in all of these fields, the exclusion of women as subjects of study mattered. It mattered because the interesting questions, grounding assumptions, and accepted answers all changed once women were brought into the picture. The fields grew, in short, as a result of including women as subjects of study.1
