History of the program: what is women’s studies?
Gender and Women’s Studies at OSU emerged as part of the nationwide curricular developments that began in the 1970s and aimed to make collegiate study relevant to current events and students’ most burning questions about the world around them. Fusing formal instruction with street smarts and personal insights, the academic field of women’s studies revolutionized disciplines such as English, psychology, history, political science, education, and sociology by validating women’s experiences as untapped sources of knowledge applicable to all sorts of university inquiry. Women’s studies programs grew more numerous and influential throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century. But of course women’s contributions to higher education and intellectual enterprise have a history that reaches back to antiquity.
Here in Stillwater, women’s influence in higher education began with Jesse Thatcher Bost, who was the first woman to graduate from what we now know as OSU in 1896. Nancy Randolph Davis was the first African American woman to enroll in the university, graduating in 1952 with a masters degree. These women paved the way for the thousands of women students who attend OSU today.
Recognizing the importance of women to OSU and seeking a way to empower them through relevant curricula, faculty began offering women’s studies courses in the 1970s. In the 1990s Women’s Studies became a formalized academic program with an undergraduate minor and a thriving women’s film festival. The program continued to grow, attracting affiliate faculty from across the university and full-time faculty whose teaching was devoted entirely to women’s studies courses.
New directions: what is gender studies?
In spring 2008 the program’s core faculty voted to change the name to Gender and Women’s Studies. This change reflects the intellectual development of the field, which grew not only to study women’s lived experience but also to consider how gender itself is constituted through everyday language, institutionalized policies, and cultural practices. While women’s studies implies a focus on women’s roles, oppression, and contributions to society, gender studies questions the generic use of “woman” as analytical category – not all women are alike! This stance allows for a fuller investigation into intersecting issues of race, class, nationality, sexuality, age, and physical ability. The move to gender studies also reflects an approach that asks how concepts of manhood and masculinities emerge historically and culturally, and invites research into the infinite varieties of gender expression. What counts as masculine or feminine changes depending on historical era, socioeconomic class, geographic location, sexual desire, and cultural or ethnic identity. On a daily basis, we routinely (and often unconsciously) invest ordinary encounters and objects with gendered meaning. Gender studies calls attention to such investments.
At OSU, we appreciate and offer both modes of analysis – women’s studies and gender studies – to students who are naturally curious about how social inequalities are perpetuated and how all people engage in, and are affected by, the gendering of our daily lives.
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