Women's studies may seem an arcane topic, but for many college students, it's a discipline that engages them immediately and profoundly.
"I realized this was one of the first classes that had relevance to my real life, unlike science or math, which are supposed to," says Alaine Kalder, 20. "It's not something isolated to one group of people. It's relevant to everyone from birth to death."
The discipline's strong activist roots in social change persist alongside academic rigor.
Proponents argue that today's women's-studies programs, and their broader partner, gender studies, radically transform students intellectually and personally, as well as the professional fields they ultimately choose.
Kalder figured that out straight away in her freshman seminar on families and gender at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Now in her junior year at UIC, Kalder is a double major in gender studies and psychology.
She helps direct the campus group Feminists United and after college expects to work as a counselor for sexual-assault victims.
Although no precise figures are available, faculty members report that female women's-studies majors are more likely to go into business for themselves, succeed in male-dominated fields and work as women's advocates.
"Women's studies is an outgrowth of the feminist movement. It is the academic arm," says Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women's Studies Association, a resource and champion for programs at U.S. colleges and universities.
"People always say that women's studies changed their lives. It certainly is about a sense of individual transformation, but it's also about social change."
Program grows
A great deal of that change started right on campus 35 years ago when a fledgling women's-studies movement set out to find and celebrate the lost heroines of history.
The discipline's initial focus also extended to the economic and social oppression of women, from the inequities of salaries to job promotion to the state of marriage, all tangible, immediately applicable lessons for women reared during the civil-rights and feminist movements.
San Diego State University reportedly launched the first stand-alone program in 1970, and the field grew rapidly through the decade as more women's-studies courses popped up around the country.
In the early days, both students and faculty led in the classroom, recalls Judith Kegan Gardiner, director of UIC's gender- and women's- studies program and one of its founders. "Students and faculty knew the same amount, we all knew zip!" she says.
Today there are 700 women's-studies programs in the United States, including a dozen doctoral programs, plus a handful of academic journals and organizations to support scholars.
Concentrations include women of color and international women.
At the University of Washington this fall, a man will chair a doctorate-awarding program in women's studies for the first time.
Many institutions have added "gender" to their department names or changed the name entirely to reflect the expanded focus of the discipline.
(Nonetheless, some program directors consider that wordplay on the part of university administrations to rationalize budget concerns and attract more male students.)
At UIC, 10 percent of gender- and women's-studies students are men, Gardiner says.
Many students, male and female, choose gender- studies courses to cross-discipline with other concentrations. Think sociology and gender, law and gender or ethnic studies and gender. But the reverse is happening too.
"Gender is part of every discipline and it's now fully integrated into all [university] courses. It's become the norm, and women's studies has to be credited with that," says Judith Roy, a professor Century College in Minnesota and president of the National Women's Studies Association.
Still, it's not time for women to let down their guard, Roy adds.
"We're in a conservative climate, and . . . some of the issues in the forefront are making a younger generation of women aware. Women's studies is in a very exciting position to get reinvigorated."
