ABSTRACT
Women’s Studies is arguably the most revolutionary new field of intellectual inquiry of our current age. In its simplest form, Women’s Studies brings all of women’s experience under the scholarly microscope, subjecting it to the most advanced scientific methods available in the university. Researchers dig up facts and develop insights about that experience and then teachers and students look at the findings coming from an array of disciplines, processing and often perfecting them. Women’s Studies programs include almost every perspective-from the natural sciences to the social sciences, from law to the arts. This breadth makes Women’s Studies the most wide-ranging of academic fields. Its rich diversity provides the judgments, research, and energy of a broad group of scholars and students to advance the discipline. Women’s Studies is a global undertaking. It began almost simul-
taneously around the world. Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea began its first Women’s Studies program in 1977. In the United States, Cornell University and California State University, San Diego, began Women’s Studies programs in 1969; more generally in the United States, Women’s Studies grew from several courses in individual universities across the country in the late 1960s to more than 600 degree-granting majors and programs today. India established vigorous Women’s Studies research in the early 1970s and became
one of the most active countries in the world to investigate women’s experience and thought. Even this phenomenal growth hardly captures the excitement that continues to motivate those in Women’s Studies. The founding of Women’s Studies was full of drama, as the
positive energy of the first students and teachers met with disapproval from male administrators, male authors, and male leaders of established departments in the West. Some governments pushed for Women’s Studies programs as part of generally moving their countries forward, while the decades of the 1970s and 1980s saw women at the grassroots fighting established dictators. It was also a time when celebrated Western intellectuals in sociobiology and anthropology were asserting women’s biological and intellectual inferiority as scientific fact and pointing, in contrast, to the risk-taking and intellectual originality of men. Women’s Studies was a fad, other naysayers claimed, and one without the slightest intellectual merit. The field was simply gynecological politics, according to still others. Yet, after several millennia of reflection on human existence and the world of nature that excluded women and that saw them as unworthy of consideration, the field of Women’s Studies inquiry not only emerged to recharge the human mind at the time but continues on its innovative path today.
