New Overview of Women\u27s Studies Courses

What follows is part of the Introduction to a new anthology of syllabi, bibliographies, descriptions of courses and programs called Female Studies VII: Going Strong, available from the Clearinghouse for $4.00 plus .50 for postage and handling. The growth of women\u27s studies in the past two years has been phenomenal. In 1971, when Female Studies III (the last volume in this series with similar content) was published, there were about 600 courses, about twenty programs. There are now well over 2000 courses and over eighty programs. Geographically they range in the United States from Orono, Maine to Honolulu, Hawaii, and there is a small but growing number of courses in the United Kingdom and Canada. In editing this volume I examined descriptions of some thirty programs and syllabi for over 200 courses

Closeup: Long Beach Women\u27s Studies Program

The record of the Center for Women\u27s Studies at California State University, Long Beach, is one of small, undramatic gains over a period of three years. As at other schools which have tried to develop women\u27s studies programs, the administration has been reluctant; unlike many other schools, so has student involvement. Cal State Long Beach is a state university of 30,000 students, on the border of conservative Orange County. Most of the students work at jobs off campus. The women\u27s liberation movement has not produced a strong women\u27s organization on campus. Although students have enrolled in large numbers in such early courses as Sociology of Women and Images of Women in Literature, until recently this interest has not issued in cohesive group action

An Overview of the Third Annual NSWA Convention: A Time for Confrontation

If exhilaration characterized the first annual NWSA Convention in Lawrence, Kansas, and consolidation the second in Bloomington, this third Convention on Women Respond to Racism was a time for confrontation. That word, of course, can imply either a squaring-off-against or a facing-together-with. Both processes were enacted at the Convention, perhaps inevitably, given a theme that acknowledged and permitted a certain kind of political struggle. The tone was set in opening addresses by Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, which prepared us for the necessary, painful, yet productive expression of anger. Some were disheartened by the speeches, feeling that in these days of the primacy of the New Right and the Moral Majority, anger among women who are essentially allies is a luxury we can little afford. Others saw the speeches as essential renderings of the complexity of relations between women of color and white women, something that has to be acknowledged before and during the larger undertakings on which we work together. The Convention program included more than 200 workshops, panels, and roundtables on topics ranging from theory about the intersections of sex, race, class, and affectional preference in society and culture, to strategies for institutional change; from the history and literature of women of color and that of their relationship with white women , to discussions of the issues now faced by women trying to work together in multiethnic programs and projects; from developin g multicultural curricula in various educational contexts, to analyzing the roles of women in Third World countries. These international panels, by all accounts, were some of the better-attended and more exciting of the sessions. One Convention-goer, by careful timing, managed to hear Johnetta Cole and Sonia Alvarez speak on Sex, Race, and Socialist Transformation in Cuba and Nicaragua ; catch Stephanie Urdang in another session on Women and Anti -Colonial Struggles ; and take in a bit of a panel on International Women Respond to Racism, moderated by Aziza al-Hibri, before participating in her own session on The Role of Women in National Development and Revolution in the Third World. The Convention program alone helped nudge those of us who tend to focus on women\u27s studies in the Anglo-American tradition away from our ethnocentrism. Such nudging, of course, was a major purpose of the Convention

What Happened at Sacramento

There it is—the cleavage in purpose and ideology that ran like a crack in the earth through the activities of the Women\u27s Conference at Sacramento in May, appropriately called Women\u27s Studies and Feminism: Survival in the 1970\u27s. The conference brought together—so to speak—some 700 women from throughout the western states for three long days of speeches, workshops, programs—and confrontations. So the work of the conference was carried out, really, on two levels: the usual conference activities of meeting, talking, listening, exchanging information and ideas; and that other, more complex, more difficult business of coping with this polarization of attitude and ideology

Review of Theories of Women\u27s Studies

Theories of Women\u27s Studies, edited by Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli-Klein. Women\u27s Studies: University of California, Berkeley, 1980. Women\u27s studies has been a significant presence on college campuses for over a decade now—time enough to have generated an important body of research, several hundred programs, thousands of individual courses, and many efforts at self-definition. This collection of five papers, most of them presented at the National Women\u27s Studies Association\u27s first annual convention in Lawrence, Kansas in 1979, extends definition to a new level of complexity and sophistication. The writers agree on certain assumptions: that women\u27s studies is education for social change, intimately linked to the women\u27s movement; that its goal of improving the status of women is perfectly legitimate, since no academic discipline is neutral and value-free; and, as Gloria Bowles says in her introduction, that Women\u27s Studies, by putting women at the center of inquiry, is a truly new and necessary approach to knowledge. While these assumptions are by now generally accepted by those in women\u27s studies, they are not commonplace in the university community as a whole

NWSA News and Views

It\u27s been a little more than a year now that I\u27ve been reporting on the Association in these columns, a little more than two years since there has been a National Women\u27s Studies Association to report on. When friends and supporters ask, How is it going?\u27 I\u27ve been forced to give a rather cryptic-seeming reply: It\u27s going steadily better, so even more is expected; but we hardly have resources to meet the original expectation, so sometimes it feels like it\u27s going worse. Often the next question from members has been, When are we going to have the Convention?\u27 A Convention, so it seems, would indicate NWSA s progress in establishing itself as a functioning organization. NWSA is moving toward the milestone that the first Convention represents. There is every reason to believe that it will have been worth waiting for, and every reason to expect that the second and third Conventions will follow even more smoothly for groundwork laid this year