Prior reports on the field

Major organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) have shown their support for the interdiscipline by sponsoring efforts to gauge its effects on students and on higher education in general. Similarly, prominent feminist scholars have taken leadership in these efforts. What follows is a summary of major studies of the field.

The National Institute of Education first commissioned a report in 1976. In the report, Seven Years Later: Women’s Studies Programs in 1976, Florence Howe reviewed fifteen Women’s Studies programs, looking at a variety of characteristics, such as their faculty. A series of eight follow-up reports appeared in 1980, with such titles as Women’s Studies in Community Colleges; The Effectiveness of Women’s Studies Teaching; The Involvement of Minority Women in Women’s Studies; and The Impact of Women’s Studies on the Campus and Disciplines. In two-day meetings, the authors of the eight monographs made four recommendations, not only to the National Institute of Education, but also to other federal offices and private foundations. These recommendations included a call for additional monographs or works on Women’s Studies; a database on the interdiscipline; the inclusion of scholars with expertise in Women’s Studies “in every aspect of research design and process” (Porter and Eileenchild, v); and continuing assessments of the field.

The first of the major assessment reports was by Catharine R. Stimpson, former director of the fellows program of the MacArthur Foundation and Dean of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science. Women’s Studies in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation appeared in 1986. Stimpson begins her report with a brief overview of the development of the traditional liberal arts curriculum in U.S. higher education, followed by histories of women’s education and the field of Women’s Studies. She traces the connections of the Civil Rights movement and the New Left to the women’s movement, and then to Women’s Studies. Her narrative of the field reflects a link between Women’s Studies and anti-racist work from the very beginning. Moreover, Stimpson summarizes the original “tasks” of the field: “For some, Women’s Studies was feminism’s academic ‘arm.’ As such, Women’s Studies had three major tasks: teaching the subject of women properly; ending sex discrimination in education on all levels, from pre-kindergarten to postdoctoral study; and integrating feminist activism with feminist thought” (12-13).

These tasks included discovering lost or forgotten women’s contributions; proving the existence of sex discrimination in various areas and recommending changes to eliminate it; and developing feminist theories. According to Stimpson, the burgeoning of research was accompanied by curriculum development in Women’s Studies and the institutionalization of programs and departments (18), with classes characterized by feminist pedagogies. Stimpson names some of the earliest scholars and funding agencies in the field; outlines the creation of research centers; and describes the early days of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). In particular, she summarizes initial, but persisting, challenges for Women’s Studies programs: “Disagreement over governance has been at once organizational and political. How should a program be run? Who should control it—students, faculty, or both? Should it include community women and activists to maintain its ties to the outside world? How can a program be anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, and collectivist, and still function” (29).