Charles pointed out to me an interesting debate about Women’s studies. If you’d like to read it, I’d suggest you begin with Dr. Crazy’s post Why Women’s Studies Sucks (I should mention that Dr. Crazy is a feminist professor). Then, read Sappho’s response to Dr. Crazy. Then, read Dr. Crazy’s follow up post and also her response to Sappho.
A reasonable critique of Dr. Crazy’s view – especially as expressed in her initial post – is that she seems to be to be critiquing a one-dimensional cartoon version of women’s studies, not the multi-dimensioned reality. (I’m paraphrasing something said in Dr. Crazy’s comments, and normally I’d credit the person being paraphrased. Alas, Dr. Crazy uses Haloscan, and right now Haloscan isn’t letting me see comments, for some mysterious Haloscan-esque reason).
Dr. Crazy’s later posts moderate this tendency, but as a result her critique sort of turns into mush, and it becomes difficult to tell what exactly she’s advocating. It reads to me as if her logic calls for eliminating women’s studies, but she’s not willing to actually go that far. Which is good! But it’s hard to understand how the halfway-measures she calls for address the problems she’s describing.
UPDATE: Check out this post as well, in which Dr. Crazy links to some other blogs discussing her posts.
I think she’s conflicted about it, thus, no clear bright line suggestion as to what to do.
For myself, I see women’s studies courses and programs as a stopgap. You have this academic enterprise which is indeed very sexist and which does indeed marginalize women’s contributions to things. What ought to happen is that the sexism ought to go away and women’s contributions to things ought to get full weight & credit. But of course, that’s difficult, and it involves a lot of hearts and minds changing.
So, as an interim, transient, small-steps approach, we end up having WS courses to handle the material that ought to be handled in the main curriculum. The unavoidable consequence of this, of course, is that women’s studies gets perceived as being peripheral to the university. Which, of course, it is; if it weren’t, you wouldn’t have “Women in The Renaissance”, you’d just have “The Renaissance” – which would include an awful lot about women.
Ideally, as time goes on, you’d see the mainstream integrating the WS material. Unfortunately, what does seem to happen is that the mainstream instead says “ok, the nutty feminists over there in WS will cover the chick stuff, so we don’t have to worry about it.” And of course, you get WS profs who like all profs have built their cozy nests and tiny empires, and they certainly don’t want to see their material (and thus their students) going over to the big departments. So it’s a mess.
Probably the best approach would be to start folding WS departments into other departments as divisions or subsections, and continue crosslisting courses, then start gradually dropping the cross-listing until everything is integrated. Easier to say than to do, of course.
I think Gerda Lerner answers this: if women’s studies are a stop gap they are a very long term stopgap. Before women’s studies feminism constantly had to be reinvented because its history was constantly lost:
I’m not going to summarize (even briefly) her “creation of feminist conciousness” here. But you can see over and over again in the Middle Ages, right through the beginning of industrialism how the idea that women were not inferior creatures to be protected/kept down so their evil would not infect men/confined to their proper sphere for the good of all had to be constantly rediscovered. Even in the 20th century, think of how after the suffragettes won the vote they became thought of as this dowdy dull old fashioned lot; no modern women wan’ts to be associated with such old fashioned worries was the thought in the 20’s. (Think of Dorthy L. Sayer with a parrot on her shoulder shouting “I will not be drab!”. An early anti-feminist feminist.)
Or think of Rosie the Riveter being driven (often quite vicously) back to the home after WWII. Gerda Lerner’s point was that for feminisim ever to advance it needed a permanant scholarly base where not only womens history but particularly the history of feminism itself would not be lost; where every old argument that had been used to grind women down would be kept so that feminist would not have have to invent their refutations anew. Where actual progress in feminist thought could be made.
As long as there is significant oppresion of women, as long as there is a significant danger of loss of womens rights, you cannot afford to “merge gender studies” back into other departments. You need some sort of institution that keeps the memory of the commonalities of women’s history in ancient Greece, Sweden in the Middle Ages and 21st century America. You need a place for specifically feminist studies. Short of a complete victory for feminism (or damn near ) you really cannot do without women’s studies or gender studies, or some other department in which feminism and women’s history are core studies – and not just sidenotes in larger subjects.
I would add that the commonalites in oppression of women at various times and places suggests that even if women gain real equality, there is enough meat in the specific subjects of women’s and gender studies that it will probably continue to need to be studied as a seperate subject.
“Woman” is more a social than biological construction. But it has been applied to half to human race quite literally since before recorded history. That means that there is such thing as women’s history that needs to be focused on specifically. (Just as “French” is a social rather than biogical construction – but the affects of that social creation are strong enough that there actually are classes specifically in French literatures, French history and so forth.)
I would consider myself too ignorant on the matter of women’s studies to say whether Dr. Crazy is right, but I think that her experience is more about being a young idealist who jumps on new ideas slavering than about women’s studies as a discipline. I’m still a young man, so I probably have a few obsessions that I’ll grow out of too, but I’ve already recognized some of the ones in my own recent past. When I first discovered economics, for example, I found the logic of supply and demand, oppurtunity costs, etc, so compelling and intuitive that I developed a sort of arrogance which led me to think I knew a lot more than I did, and I annoyingly lectured a lot of people I knew about Giffen goods, Pareto optima, etc. I now realize that I’m still very ignorant on economics — though I still love the subject enough to be majoring in math with a specialization in economics — but I still found the ideas so compelling that I went a bit overboard with them.
Does this mean that economics as a discipline is flawed? Well, I suspect a lot of the radical types around here would say “yes,” and even I’ll admit that the stuff with price being on the vertical axis and quantity being on the horizontal axis is pretty dumb. I think, though, that it could have been another subject — that had I taken psychology, or women’s studies, or whatever, I might just as easily have become entranced with an idea to the point of arrogant obsessiveness.
That isn’t to say that specific ideas are totally neutral, I’m just saying that being young means that, on the pro-side, you tend to learn things faster and really “get” new ideas and incorporate them into your mindset more, and on the con-side, you may lack some of the reflectiveness and skepticism of age that allows you to be more questioning of new frameworks. I’m not sure it’s really my place to talk about how ol’ grown ups who are in, say, their 50s think, because I’m not one (though hopefully I will be some day). I do think that generally it’s acknowledged (or at least stereotyped) that when we young’uns go to college and discover some idea, we have a tendency to be a bit… idealistic about it. Dr. Crazy was determined never to reaad a male author, I thought of the Iraq war using cost-benefit analysis and cited Nordhaus budgety articles in opposiing it, some other guy discovered propositional logic in an intro course and is explaining modus ponens to his mom in confused phone conversations and annoying his colleagues at the dining hall, etc.
Hmmm…I’ve taken one women’s studies class(history) in my life, but I don’t think society’s going to implose b/c of the fact that there are women’s studies programs out there. My only objections to WS, is that it should be as diverse as the women it teaches about and it’s problematic when it’s used as a “requirement” by some feminists to be a member of the One True Feminist Movement.
That said, I think it’s been helpful to many women, who’ve been excluded to White Men’s history, literature, science, arts, music, etc. masquerading in our equalitarian society under History, Literature, and so forth.
I did want to address the women vs gender studies issue. Well, we change it to gender, and it’s not going to be equal, b/c don’t you know? Gender=men.
Here in California, we had proposition 209, which was backlash to increased, if incremental progress made by men of color and women in getting governmental contracts and positions in classes in the state universities. Because the proponants of 209 emphasized the race aspect of this progress(which was far less than the actual gains of white women, the main beneficiaries of A.A.), the majority of white women voted to pass 209. So, one aspect of 209 required women’s resource centers to be called Gender resource centers(ironically, at some campuses more men than women used these centers, even b/f the name change). They finally changed the names of the centers back on several campuses that were affected, to women. But it has made me very skeptical of the whole gender=equality argument.