Women's Studies Department

The Women's Studies classroom not only acknowledges the "fundamental fact" that on most campuses today women cannot move about as freely after dark as men, it develops analytic skills that enable students like Marguerite (story on home page) to explain such inequities and, ultimately, work to correct them.

The central category of analysis in Women's Studies is gender, the socially constructed and historically variable understanding of what it means to be a "woman" or a "man." Throughout history, however, and in all known cultures, power has been distributed differentially (and unequally) according to gender. As Virginia Woolf and Marguerite realized, men in general have more freedom, power, and access to resources than do women in general.

But women exist in the particular as well as in general, and Women's Studies pays at least as much critical attention to differences among women as it does to differences between women and men. Gender thus becomes merely the focal point of analysis in complex interaction with race, ethnicity, class, sexual identity, age, and ability. White, middle class, straight, able-bodied women of a certain age have considerably more access to power and resources than women of color, poor women, lesbians, the disabled, the very young or very old.

If two phrases can be said to sum up Women's Studies, they would be "the personal is political" and "knowledge is power." Both are illustrated by Marguerite's story. A combination of research (reading Woolf) and observation (surveying the traffic in and out of the library) led Marguerite to the recognition that her experience was shared and political, not merely personal, and that knowledge was empowering. More importantly, the setting of Marguerite's story--the library--symbolizes the ultimate challenge of Women's Studies to traditional and inequitable distributions of power. Throughout history and in all known cultures, certain men have determined what counts as "knowledge" and will, therefore, be reproduced and circulated as "truth." Women's Studies both critiques as "androcentric" existing theories and methodologies and seeks to reconstruct and reproduce knowledge to include the experience of the previously excluded.

. . . that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. Doris Lessing (1919--)