Women's Studies and Its Discontents
Stimpson, Catharine R.
In the spring of 1995, I taught an undergraduate class in women's studies at Rutgers University, a large public university. All of the students, even the "nontraditional" ones, were younger than...
...In a comparatively supportive review of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in 1995, Elizabeth FoxGenovese writes, "One would not turn to SIGNS for an impartial appraisal of Margaret Thatcher's record, much less for appreciation of her political genius...What SIGNS does, it does well— according to its own lights...
...Women's studies must now argue out such questions with these critical scholars far more openly...
...If heterosexual or bisexual, they do not expect a man to pay for their food and shelter...
...Second, Third Wavers want roses as well as bread and keyboards...
...A list of my earlier essays on women's studies is available from me...
...Indeed, Queer Studies, which has grown defiantly in the 1990s, actively seeks to demonstrate how "queerness" is a common ground for some women and men...
...Much, though, is left to do...
...In 1992, I shared a panel with anAfrican-American student...
...If so, women will never gain full citizenship in the Information Society, especially if they are poor...
...This citizenship—like food, water, shelter and freedom from violence—is a survival need...
...Educators are aware of such other gender issues as sexual harassment and the need for childcare...
...Would Second Wave feminists, I asked myself, dismiss the words of the Third Wave as an immature siren's cry...
...This provoked me to think about women's studies at large: its achievements...
...white women by 15 percent...
...All of my students are sexually sophisticated...
...Who will ride this wave most successfully...
...to determine what the overarching laws and powers that will govern cyberspace are to be...
...They have given women information that can enhance, even save, their lives...
...Next, feminism would attack the media, the studios that market lessons and images for a mass culture...
...Consequently, affinity groups begin their work from a position of inconsequentiality...
...I'm in a male-dominated school...
...And nothing, nothing is ever the fault of the complainant...
...Instead, "discourse" shapes and sculpts these realities...
...The Information Society tells us that our minds, not our bodies, are our power generators...
...women 8.2 percent...
...If I say something passé, I shrug and add, "Just an old Second Waver burbling on...
...Under the influence of anthropologists, historians, and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, women's studies then distinguished between sex, a biological condition subject to some of the rules of nature, and gender, a social construction subject to the rules of culture...
...In the 1960s, it gained renewed vigor— even as the Information Society was being born...
...their often-disabling discriminations...
...Methodologically, many women's studies programs, even those disdainful of reductionism, have relied too much on statements of personal experience and anecdotes...
...But the barbarians (multiculturalists, tenured radicals, radical feminists, gender feminists, gays and lesbians) have apparently won...
...and Marjorie Perloff, Deborah Rhode, Wendy Walker-Moffat, Mary Ellen Capek, Sue Hallgarth, and especially to Michael Walzer for their comments...
...they would like to think that their education and the economy will mesh...
...Third Wavers may know about marginality, but they find little glamour in it...
...Their writing is the (partially) repressed content of women's studies...
...The admirable desire to help each woman develop her voice has had an unintended consequence: neglecting to teach our students how to move effectively in the rhetorical spaces between autobiography and wild overgeneralization, between saying "I hate my father" and "All men are hateful...
...The forces of civilization must now fight as the English did under the leadership of Winston Churchill in the terrible early days of World War II...
...nationality for Australian or Canadian women's studies...
...All have biological males, but the meaning of becoming a man differs from one society to another...
...Next, feminism would create cultural alternatives, a new art, literature, film, music, journalism, and religion...
...In the late 1960s and early 1970s, women's studies spoke sweepingly about "The Patriarchy" and about "woman"—as if "The Patriarchy" were the equivalent of original sin and "woman" the equivalent of redemption...
...All societies have biological females, but the meaning of becoming a woman differs from one society to another...
...Fininism's transformative educational acts had two goals...
...Aiding and abetting these discrepancies are powerful cultural representations of the scientist...
...So exercised, I retain my faith that women's studies is helping to redesign democracy and the mind...
...Authoritative dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, companions, and guides are now being published...
...Inexorably, gender studies has supplemented and in some places supplanted women's studies...
...many programs still scrounge for institutional resources...
...As repressed content is wont to do, it returned—in the Third Wave 1990s—in debased and strident form...
...Not surprisingly, important texts of the Information Society and of feminism appeared at the same time...
...I take women's studies so I can talk without scaring people...
...In the United States, between 1980 and 1990, the number of indigenous women attending college increased by 30 percent...
...In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique...
...In the 1970s, however, some feminists began to distrust the analysis of sexual difference that stripped women of agency and cast them as little more than men's victims...
...huskier access to sports...
...Since the 1980s, some social conservatives and neoconservatives have organized highly visible campaigns that have lambasted women's studies and announced that academic feminism betrays the free market, the free world, free and objective inquiry, the family, and heterosexuality without tears...
...In philosophy, for example, Sara Ruddick began to elaborate the theory of "maternal thinking," a benign cognitive and ethical activity that arises from the practice of mothering...
...For historical and psychological reasons, these groups stake out a place on the margins of society...
...Like an angry shadow, the opposition has mutated as women's studies has mutated and as larger forces have stormed over the sociopolitical landscape...
...In turn, reductive thought provided a scaffolding, which both postmodernism and common sense dismantle, for identity politics: the belief that a single, pure element of identity—be it race, ethnicity, nation, gender, sexual preference, or religion—determines one's norms, values, affiliations, politics, public behavior, and subjectivity...
...They think that Second Wavers, even as they broke open the discourse of female sexuality, drew too firm a line between heterosexuality and homosexuality...
...My white students long to have permission to make mistakes about "The Other" without being punished or told to shut up in order to learn from these mistakes...
...q Notes This paper was given as the Deborah L. Rhode Lecture at Stanford University on May 24, 1995...
...The Good Women of Responsible Feminism often adapt a Gothic narrative strategy...
...No matter who their supervisors might have been, Third Wavers are—almost to a person— deeply worried about the economy...
...their often-violent hierarchies...
...They apply to graduate and professional schools...
...But so are tribe, nation, religion, language, culture, age, beauty, or illness...
...Majority women are far more conscious of differences among women, especially racial differences...
...One reason for college is to get credentials for a good job...
...the white woman who galvanized the class with her descriptions of being on welfare as a single mom...
...Straight, gay and lesbian, or bisexual, most of them want to be parents...
...Helping women obtain it is a basic responsibility of women's studies...
...Despite its novelty, cyberspace is busy cultivating old sexist habits...
...So does its static quality...
...that women's studies has invented itself only in the last thirty years...
...Many women are torn between their desire to be a good mother and their desire to be a good scholar, scientist, or administrator...
...But no matter how necessary these stories are, they are not sufficient...
...Such rhetorical flourishes have helped the genre make its mark...
...A degree's market value has increased in great part because we know that few of us can market ourselves in the Information Society without a degree...
...Though twitchy, I have a stubborn muscle in my optimism...
...Tenure is still more elusive for women than for men...
...All of the students, even the "nontraditional" ones, were younger than I. I felt a fine affection for my students: the political science major who wanted to become a record producer...
...Shannon Faulkner, for example, is chronologically a Third Waver using Second Wave legal theory to achieve a First Wave goal...
...Like others, I worry that the contemporary world will back away from the modern effort to picture and treat women as conscious, educable, active, public figures...
...hear my self-divisions roar...
...African-Ameri68 • DISSENT Women's Studies can women by 16 percent...
...As books inspired the Second Wave, soon-line information inspires the Third Wave...
...Coping with this dreary old stuff, women must also join with men to confront the wildly new and unsettled...
...Self-consciously and imaginatively, contemporary feminism invented itself as a sweeping movement for educational change...
...Women's studies regarded WINTER • 1996 • 69 Women's Studies men's studies with a contradictory combination of suspicion, tension, respect, and warmth...
...Will women have passports to "telecommunities," (a phrase I owe to George Bugliarello), the groups that form in cyberspace...
...However, men's studies proved far less compelling than several other issues that cut to the quick of the women's studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...They also find some fun in critiquing Second Wave dowdiness...
...One study found that 49 percent of the boys in the eleventh grade in American high schools had used an electricity meter, but only 17 percent of the girls...
...The army of the civilized must defend the West...
...B. the texts that lash out against women's studies belong to a much bigger polemical genre that others and I have discussed: the labeling and dismissing of the "contemporary left," a potpourri that includes people who could not check off the differences between Stalin and Trotsky, let alone Marx and Mao, on a multiple-choice exam...
...In the 1970s, in part in reaction to the interest in "the female" or "women's culture," men's studies were first developed: an elaboration of "the male" or "men's culture" or "the construction of masculinity...
...I see this story as consisting of three waves, although the formulaic and Toffleresque qualities of the metaphor abash me...
...The reaction against women's studies is but one element of larger efforts to contain the modern struggle for educational and social equity...
...They know a lot about pornography...
...The second, equally sweeping fear is that changes in our thinking about women will entail dismaying changes in our social, familial, and psychological order...
...A 1994 "exposé" bears the scary title Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women 's Studies...
...They take out loans...
...They are too realistic to live by hope alone...
...Despite these mutations, the opposition has had a constant theme: women's studies is the monster mother of gender rebellion and mindlessness...
...Not every program has flourished...
...And its supporters must reach moderates with persuasive arguments as to why it is still necessary in the mid-1990s...
...Or so I would will—in this, a Second Wave but unwavering dream...
...only the possessors of graduate degrees outstripped inflation over a twenty-year period...
...In the Information Society For many reasons, the struggle over women's education was less visible during the early middle and middle part of the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth, certainly in the United States...
...I then remember that men and women have worked throughout history to make education empowering for all...
...They wanted to picture women instead as survivors and creators...
...First, they want to hear their own stories, both personal narratives and histories of the groups in which they claim membership...
...I am woman...
...Practiced by both liberals and conservatives, the genre first announces that a culture war is going on...
...and race and ethnicity for black feminist studies, Latina or Chicana studies, Native American or Asian-American women's studies...
...the "Others" the Bad Girls of Irresponsible Feminism andAcademic Defile72 • DISSENT Women's Studies ment, witchy creatures who prefer peaked hats and broomsticks to caps and gowns...
...74 • DISSENT Women's Studies My fears stain spaces beyond my women's studies classroom in New Jersey...
...A syllabus cannot 70 • DISSENT Women's Studies be an agenda...
...sexual preference for lesbian studies...
...The percentage of illiterate men is alarming, the percentage of illiterate women, especially rural women, more so...
...The necessity of educating women, at least narrowly, is a theme on which feminists and many nonfeminists now agree...
...To be "for" women is more fertile, but this plot is also barren if that is all that there is...
...My students want to learn how the postmodern, global economy works and how to find a place in it from which they can support themselves and their families—however they define family...
...However, academic work demands the interrogation of moral visions, blueprints for change, and ideas...
...Women and gender, as academic subjects, have entered the culture and the curriculum...
...One may be born female, de Beauvoir claims, but one becomes a woman...
...In 1970, at the American Philosophical Association's convention, none of the hundred papers was on race or gender...
...Because "gender" is arguably a more capacious term than "women," this may be a valuable move, but it has provoked a sharp attack in Europe and North America on intellectual and political grounds...
...Dialogue and principled coalition," states the black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, "create possibilities for new versions of truth...
...In many places, the First is still the leading wave...
...a warmer welcome in such citadels of power as presidencies, boards of governors, and tenured faculties...
...In part, the ambitious riders of the Second Wave renewed the struggle for access...
...The Third Wavers in my classes regard me tolerantly...
...religion for feminist spirituality...
...The first is to examine its own structures and internal processes...
...The Third Wave takes the achievements of the First and Second Wave as much for granted as they do CD-ROMs...
...All have gender systems, but their structure, processes, and meanings differ markedly...
...the out lesbian who drove a Jeep and insisted on spelling women "womyn...
...I realize how many narratives there are, how scorching postmodern critiques have been, and how dangerous totalizing narratives and universalizing selves can be...
...Even the most benighted advocate of the belief in Woman as Total Victim must accept a painful contradiction: if many societies deprive women of power over themselves, some women still have powers to exercise...
...Since 1986, in the United States, for example, they now earn the majority of bachelor's and master's degrees...
...Erupting with exaggerations, making a part of the whole the whole shebang, the genre distorts and lies without the slightest sign of shame...
...This muscle flexes and insists that history can be its Nautilus machine as well as rack and Catherine wheel...
...I am grateful to the Stanford Institute for Research on Women and Gender for inviting me...
...In Cyberspace As I sat in the circle of chairs in my spring 1995 classroom with its dreary cinderblock walls, fear tinctured my feelings about my students and work...
...If societies refuse to teach women to read and write a natural language, will they give women access to computer languages and computers...
...Because most of these women chronologically belong to the Second Wave, they articulate an intra-generational perspective that differs from that of younger revisionary writers such as Katie Roiphe...
...Intensifying this anxiety is the financial pressure of getting through college...
...In the 1970s, women's studies turned from "The Patriarchy" as a description of the workings and fixings of history to an iron triangle, "race/class/gender," a threefold set of historical categories that was meant to characterize all societies, at all times, in all places...
...I'm so tired of going to my Women and Politics course and hearing nothing about race...
...They sign up for too many courses at once so that they can get their degree as quickly as possible...
...The Second Wave gathered its strength in the middle of the twentieth century...
...I'm so tired," she said, "of going to my Black Politics course and hearing nothing about women...
...They are the Good Women of Responsible Feminism and Academic Tradition...
...Women's studies falters when it gives up the necessary tension between the academy and any social and political movement, and baldly subordinates "studies" to "women...
...Crucially, the Information Society, at once ballyhoo and the fabric of our lives, was simultaneously emerging...
...Feeling vulnerable, faculty, staff, and students then make too many demands on women's studies programs...
...hear me suffer, hear me protest, hear my innocence...
...Traversing both of these issues is a third, that of differences among women...
...Unless women's studies can write them in accessible language, Third Wavers will turn elsewhere...
...God," one of them is saying, "they were fun then—women...
...colonization for post-colonial or subaltern studies...
...My students work as waitresses, waiters, baby-sitters, clerks, fork-lift operators, nursing home attendants, security guards...
...They like to wear lipstick—be it pink, red, purple, brown, black, or blue...
...Despite affirmative action, equitable hiring is an ideal, not a commonplace, and, as I have argued elsewhere, if affirmative action survives, it needs rethinking...
...Inside the classroom and out, Third Wavers are aware of diversity and, for the most part, believe in it...
...For the waves wash over each other...
...Only hardy misogynists and gender traditionalists today believe that women are best WINTER • 1996 • 67 Women's Studies barefoot, pregnant, and illiterate...
...From the beginning, ideology, methodology, theoretical commitments, and disciplinary allegiances had divided people in women's studies...
...These Third Wavers have complicated attitudes about the sex-saturated culture in which they find themselves, the constant downloading of desire that is designed partially to deflect economic anxieties...
...I'm going into a male-dominated profession," she told a class...
...and that the gender changes that have been inseparable from modernism, feminism, and the birth of the Information Society seem irrevocable...
...By 1990, at least one hundred and sixty-four free-standing and universitybased research centers focused on women...
...Though they overlapped, they mirrored one of the dominant tensions within feminism at large...
...legitimacy for women and women's studies in "mainstream" academic disciplines...
...Theorists of feminist pedagogy believe that such classrooms are a model for education in a multicultural world...
...I am unquenchably in debt to feminism for a moral vision, blueprints for social change, ideas, psychological support, and vitality...
...In our designs, we are a company of equals, some of us smarter and more talented than others, but all of us processing our words with liveliness, liberty, and, from byte to byte, a little happiness...
...However, even if my Third Wavers were to accept a narrative of modernity, they are suspicious of a stress on individual rights that seems to ignore social relations...
...When Third Wavers talk candidly, they say they are sick of being saturated with images of lousy sexualityin pornography, movies and television, advertisements...
...It is not a monster mother breeding monstrous children, but the work of women and men who have toiled to do that old-fashioned thing: make the world different and better...
...I think of a recent William Hamilton cartoon in the New Yorker...
...Several activities are involved here...
...Fewer of them, however, support the antipornography movement than its advocates might want...
...Even today, women do not have guaranteed access to basic literacy...
...Most of the Bad Girls seem to be white, another erasure of the contributions to women's studies of women of color...
...Third Wavers believe in education...
...They are torn...
...Simply to be against the patriarchy is too barren a landscape of meaning...
...Much of the energy of women's studies was and is spent documenting the invidious nature of sexual differences...
...More women are entering colleges and universities...
...Feminists, however, have cared passionately about women's education...
...About two thousand colleges and universities now have some sort of a women's studies curriculum...
...women took 18.8 percent...
...For example, in 1962, Fritz Machlup issued his pioneering text about the Information Society, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in The United States, analyzing the production of knowledge as an economic activity...
...Ironically, in the United States, the harder it has become to pay for higher education, the more its market value has increased for both genders...
...And its lights are those of academic feminism, which persists in a determination to see the larger world through its own lens...
...By 1993, 44.7 percent of assistant professors were women...
...Another, more prevalent, is the exploration of group difference...
...Once inside women's studies, they have now escaped to tell a story of bondage and danger...
...They long for a balance of sexual satisfaction and cultural grace...
...Employment is more equitable...
...The older women's arguments reconstitute the dreary binary opposition between Good Women and Bad Girls...
...Utopian dreams of the radical social transformations that women's studies might breed still linger, but the pragmatism of increasing maturity tempers them...
...In 1993, college graduates earned 57 percent more than people without a college degree...
...The Third Wavers also want large, cohering narratives...
...As a result, Third Wavers combine their recognition of job discrimination with skepticism WINTER • 1996 • 73 Women's Studies about the moral superiority of women...
...In 1993, one of my students was an accounting major and the secretary of the university's club for business students...
...In this overreliance on the personal voice, we have sometimes permitted individual stunts and childish exhibitionism to substitute for teaching...
...The purpose of even more conversations is pedagogical...
...the tenure clock" encapsulates this tension...
...Although some Third Wavers are more aware than others of the glass ceiling, although some are more aware of the conflicts between work and family life, although some are more aware that they may run on the fast track all the way to the middle, they all know about job discrimination...
...These uncertainties about women in the Information Society are part and parcel of questions about the future of cyberspace itself...
...The answers to such questions are unknown...
...The class taught me about the current stage of women's studies, a field that is constantly evolving...
...The third, in part an attempt to dissolve such pernicious relations, is for groups to enter into mutually respectful conversations and coalitions...
...I am a Second Waver...
...Here are some of the great Second Wave achievements, successful because they met deep needs: • Much overt discrimination, which official policies and practices had formalized, has disappeared...
...Next, it would organize small "consciousnessraising" groups, where women would learn from each other about their lives in order to change those lives...
...Because historians have mapped the First Wave so well, let me begin with the second...
...Religious fundamentalists chime in that women's studies/academic feminism is ungodly, too...
...Under the pressure of these perceptions, women's studies taught itself not to speak of a universal woman, an "essential femaleness...
...Nor, crucially, do most women have equal access to training in the sciences and technology that are the foundation of the Information Society...
...magazine went into action...
...I write now, not as a computer scientist nor as a skilled weaver of the world-wide web, but as a citizen who does kindergarten-level work with Windows and Word Perfect...
...The second issue is the status of postmodern and poststructural theories...
...Enrolling in undergraduate women's studies, they also want scholarship about women and gender integrated throughout the curriculum as a whole...
...Under a variety of rubrics, "women's studies" is a force...
...Despite the growth in the number of men who actively care for their children, daily child-rearing is still women's work...
...Hispanic women by 73 percent...
...in part, they sought to transform institutions of teaching and learning...
...the discontents it has caused and suffered...
...Indeed, 95 percent of my spring 1995 students said they had first learned about pornography by finding stuff that belonged to their fathers, uncles, or brothers...
...They expect to enter a diverse work force...
...How they want to parent, and with whom, varies according to the individual...
...Recently, in a movement that cohered in 1993, a small group of women who call themselves feminists of one stripe or another has joined in the search for radical or ill-conceived women's studies...
...Obviously, not everyone who cares about educating women for citizenship in the Information Society is a feminist...
...This abandonment is manifest in the simplistic labeling of complex phenomena...
...WINTER • 1996 • 71 Women's Studies Wave Three Women have made many educational gains...
...I have little faith in my auditory acuities, but I think I hear my Third Wavers ask for two things...
...Psychologically, postmodern theories provide a picture of the self that is fluid and fragmented, a turbulent river fed by multiple streams and springs...
...My hope is that Second and Third Wavers together can also reaffirm the narrative of modernity itself...
...If these two had been adequate, women's studies would have been irrelevant...
...very few claim a place in the center...
...They are skeptical of remedial courses in morality that Second Wavers legislate...
...How can we cast this narrative aside...
...To do so was to commit the intellectual sin of"essentialism...
...Finally, feminism would "transform," or at least alter, the sites of formal education from childcare to research centers...
...WINTER • 1996 • 75...
...Of course, race, class, and gender are crucial categories and experiences that at once unify some people and cruelly divide them from others...
...In the Information Society, education—the active acquisition of theories, knowledge, and information-handling competencies—matters for success...
...However, until established faculties revise their curricula and their attitudes, many students need women's studies as a breathing space...
...The purpose of some conversations is to write new philosophical, historical, or social narratives...
...They do not want censorship, but they do not want the images of sexuality that surround them...
...Susan Faludi has written pungently of "The backlash brain trust: from neocons to neofems...
...In 1977, the American Library Association took up the question of libraries in a postindustrial, information society, while Elaine Showalter was publishing A Literature of Their Own and Barbara K. Smith "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism...
...In the United States, for example, white women did own black slaves—of both sexes...
...The First Wave was for access to educational institutions and the domain of reason...
...They are to provide an impossible model of egalitarianism and cooperation, a haven of principle, a nurturing sanctuary...
...its place in the larger story about women and education, particularly in the United States...
...These telecommunities do more than gossip in chatrooms...
...I am woman...
...Cross-Currents The Third Wave now moves in these cross-currents...
...entrance and far greater rates of admission to professional education...
...For nearly all of them, women's studies has turned feminist political convictions into foundational intellectual principles...
...Cyberspace is still new territory, if familiar enough to readers of speculative fiction and to hackers...
...And I'm so tired of going to my American Politics course and hearing nothing about women or race...
...If a program or a "leader" lapses for a moment, complaints flow as if the two were the unforgivably never-good-enough mother...
...Asian American women by 99 percent...
...For my students have a sexually libertarian and fluid streak...
...To them, Second Wavers are a graying boring troop, given to war stories, choruses of "I am woman, hear me roar," and demands for grateful Mother's Day cards from Third Wavers...
...Even the most benighted essentialist must admit that women have differed and do differ...
...Philosophically, they sustain the attack on "essentialism" and, in a compatible move, question the assumption that the languages we use accurately mirror the realities we inhabit...
...If they do, like some "white women's groups," they express (often legitimately) guilt about their privilege...
...Both goals provoked resistance, the reformist goal less than the radical, for many pursuers of the radical goal celebrated "women-identified women" and questioned heterosexual norms...
...Symbolically, the title of the 1995 National Women's StudiesAssociation meeting, an event that has survived several near-death experiences, was both bold and qualified: "Cultural, Intellectual, and Political (R)evolutions...
...Identity politics encourages like to bond with like, and women's studies has been a growth industry for affinity groups...
...Or would we listen to them...
...It would rebuild the schoolroom of the home...
...The Third Wavers realize that most of them will be earning their living after they graduate...
...Exacerbating women's difficulties, as well as those of less affluent men, are the current economic troubles for civic institutions in general and higher education in particular...
...The first is that women of all races, like minorities of both genders, are irrational, castrators of reason, by nature nonacademic...
...Three sleek, well-fed white men are lighting up cigars and lifting brandy snifters before a glowing fireplace...
...In 1989, men took 91.8 percent of the doctorates in engineering inAmerican graduate schools...
...The phrase "the biological clock vs...
...In the United States, between 1972 and 1989, the proportion of women who were assistant professors grew from 24 percent to more than 38 percent...
...Nevertheless, the narrative of modernity encourages us to believe in pluralism over monism, secularism over fundamentalism, democracy over totalitarianism, inclusiveness and equality over hierarchy, acceptance of individual differences over conformity to group norms, and reasonable inquiries over dogma and militant revelations...
...The first and more reformist educational goal was equal access for women to existing institutions, an access that the first wave had been unable to achieve: schooling for all women...
...First, though not always foremost, feminism would improve child-rearing and socialization practices...
...One effect was to mismeasure sexual difference by making the male "the norm" of human behavior and the female an abnormal variant...
...In 1972, the Japanese presented a white paper, The Plan for Information Society, a National Goal Toward Year 2000, and Ms...
...In 1982, John Naisbitt, in Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives, told Americans that the most explosive shift in their lives was that from an industrial to an information society, and Carol Gilligan, in In A Different Voice, suggested that women and men differed as moral reasoners...
...Spending freezes," "hiring freezes," "privatization," "cutbacks," and that dear euphemism, "restructuring," are the vocabulary of increasing scarcity...
...Is it women, a sex-specific group, or gender, a system that constructs and links the meanings of "woman" and "man...
...They were, however, inadequate, for they had excluded, marginalized, and belittled women...
...The first is the very subject of women's studies...
...between carrying a laptop and holding a child on one's lap...
...Although the opposition reflects professional resistance to any change in bibliographies and lecture notes, it also embodies two gender-specific fears...
...Nevertheless, in part because of the sacrifices of the pioneers, a moral, cognitive, and affective vision of education is in place...
...Not every pioneer has survived...
...The First Wave, gathering strength in the West in the nineteenth century, was inseparable from women's push for access to political institutions...
...Only the naive will be shocked, shocked that women's studies has stimulated a backlash...
...The desire for a helpful economic narrative crosses class, gender, and racial lines—a defining feature of a big, sprawling, multicultural center...
...Ironically, partly because of Second Wave pressures to advance women in the labor force, several of my students have had women bosses, not all of whom have been paragons of sisterhood...
...A Third Wave, which includes my students, is now picking up speed in turbulent waters...
...Finally, women's studies has often been cool towards an increasingly organized but still diffuse collection of critical scholar/writers—interested in the subjects of women and gender but alienated from women's studies as usual...
...Table 1.3 of the 1989 UNESCO Statistical Yearbook gives the percentage of men and women over the age of 15 who are illiterate in 129 countries and territories...
...Its riders have had to wage an obnoxious battle to convince powerful and powerless alike that the female skull did embrace an agile brain and that this brain was worth cultivating...
...The women's studies classroom has been a historic experiment in designing conditions that will encourage interactions among different groups and people...
...Simultaneously, postmodern science and medicine were inventing brave new reproductive technologies that also destabilized beliefs about gender relations that once seemed fixed by nature's law...
...One woman's masturbatory practices do not a syllabus make...
...The four international meetings about women that the United Nations sponsored between 1975 and 1995 strengthened the global perception of the importance of women's studies primarily because of the work of nongovernmental organizations...
...entry to powerful all-male undergraduate schools, such as the military academies...
...Men took 81.2 percent of the doctorates in the physical sciences...
...New Themes, New Questions Women's studies began with a critique of knowledge and its institutions...
...the African-American student, the first in her family to attend college, whose mother and aunt had protected her while she was growing up in a tough urban neighborhood...
...In 1992, in the United States, only about 12 percent of the chief executive officers of our 3,500 or so institutions of higher education were women...
...They would like to be less frightened...
...Each of these groups then engaged in three ongoing tasks...
...Indeed, the greater the gain, the more virulent the backlash—perhaps our nasty social equivalent of Newton's third law of motion...
...Sexual politics hurts women...
...For others, women's studies has refused to admit how necessary to society the legal, heterosexual family is...
...For some of them, women's studies has ignored and evaded the power of nature in the construction of gender—whether nature is revealed through evolutionary biology, the neurosciences, cognitive studies, or genetics...
...In 1990, twentyone of two hundred and twenty-four papers took up these issues...
...In part because of strong social resistance, in lesser part because a marginal zone can become a quasi-masochistic comfort zone, they tend to travel no further...
...that reassures them that they are free, feminists, and active members of human communities...
...As Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and others have shown, we too often masculinize the scientist and feminize the nature that he is to unveil and explore...
...When and where will it break...
...Where elsewhere might be I do not know...
...to students in my women's studies classes at Rutgers University...
...To be a feminist academic is to balance multiple worlds...
...Was the chief end of feminism the support of gender equality, which stressed the similarities between men and women, or was it the redemption of gender difference, which stressed female specificity...
...They like the feminist political theory that connects the autonomous self with others...
...7 add to the pain, a belligerent backlash against women is whipping through higher education...
...To its unheralded credit, analyzing them is a feature of the serious feminist literature...
...They are aware of the new technologies of birth...
...The survivors of incest and rape are wary...
...The second and more radical goal was the creation of a variety of ideas, norms, and public spaces about and for "women as women": theories about women's ways of knowing, women's centers, rape crisis centers, the more separatist women's studies programs, and lesbian studies...
...People can go on-line to get core reading lists...
...By mid-1995, the National Council for Research on Women, with over seventy-five member centers in the United States, had 254 international research and resource centers on its formal listing...
...In the United States, on-line sexual harassment and braggadocio have proved so irritating that two antimacho on-line services for women were established in the early 1990s...
...They need genuine conversations about diversity with ground rules that they help to devise...
...In the 1970s, women's studies fissured even further into academic cohorts that fused the study of sex and gender with at least one other powerful element of biological, social, and/or cultural identity: class for Marxist-feminist or materialist feminist studies...
...They need a sense of values...
...Doubts and Worries To my regret, I cannot end this brief description of the Second Wave on a wholly sanguine note...
...Students of color and/or from newer immigrant families want to claim their heritage...
...The second task is to make visible its relations with other groups, particularly relations of domination and dependence...
...And yet, the explicit alliance between contemporary feminists—reformers and radicals—and higher education produced such important victories that many people have concluded that feminism has now given way to postfeminism...
...The army of the left barbarians is out to destroy Western values...
...For Second Wave women's studies has made mistakes that have left it open to doubt...
...Rapidly, the study of differences among women joined the study of differences between women and men...
...A persistent error has been to misconstrue the relations between feminism and academic work...
...One, which the journal differences represents, is the sophisticated inquiry into the various meanings of "difference...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
