An editorial in The New York Times (July 15, 2002) demonstrates the impact that women's studies scholarship can have on disciplinary knowledge and public policy. In "Why the Hormone Study Finally Happened," Anne Dranginis, associate professor of biological sciences at St. John's University, credits the recent ground-breaking study of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to Dr. Bernadine Healy, the first woman to head the National Institutes of Health. As a feminist, Dr. Healy was able to see the neglect of gender in medical research and was motivated to fix the problem, Professor Dranginis argues. When Dr. Healy insisted that the N.I.H. concern itself with women's health by undertaking such important studies as the one just ended and by including women in clinical trails (prior to Dr. Healy's appointment in 1991, women were generally excluded from clinical trials), she was not widely supported and was even criticized for allowing "special-interest politics" to intrude on science. With the surprising results of the HRT study, disputing its reputed benefits and showing that HRT can actually harm women, we can see clearly the difference of making gender a category of analysis, the primary objective of women's studies scholarship. We can also see the difference it makes when women and men trained in feminist analysis are appointed to leadership positions.
The first women's studies programs nationally were founded in 1969 at San Diego State and Cornell. Contrary to popular belief, such programs were founded neither to celebrate women nor to malign men nor to inject partisan politics into objective knowledge. Rather, the programs were founded to coordinate and facilitate feminist analysis across the disciplines, and to promote feminist advocacy for social justice. Women's studies is an interdisciplinary field that takes gender as its primary category of analysis. This research agenda has led to the rethinking of knowledge and methodologies in a wide range of fields.
- Carol Gilligan's study of moral development in the early 80's threw into question the widely-accepted stages of moral development outlined by Lawrence Kohlberg, which turned out to be based on unacknowledged and biased assumptions about gender differences.
- Gerda Lerner's research on women's history challenged accepted ways of periodizing history.
- Anthropologists Michelle Rosaldo and Sherry Ortner rethought the androcentric and ethnocentric views of the effect of biology on so-called sex roles.
- Heidi Hartmann explained why women worked so hard and earned so little.
- Jean Baker Miller reconsidered common psychological definitions of femininity.
The new language, definitions, concepts, and categories introduced by such scholarship have since been integrated into the disciplinary thinking of these and many other fields. This is why Marilyn Boxer, a scholar at Stanford University's Institute for Research on Women and Gender calls women's studies "the most expansive new field of knowledge in higher education of our era."
The women and men educated on the work of the second-wave feminists such as those cited above have now entered public life as wage-earners and social activists. In Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards cite numerous examples of how exposure to women's studies scholarship has galvanized young people today to work for social justice. Becky Michaels works for the publisher Little, Brown, and Company and also runs a support group for battered women in New York. Farai Chideya, a syndicated political columnist and correspondent for such shows as Good Morning America, maintains her own web site called Pop and Politics. Tammy Rae teaches art at the University of North Carolina and has founded a record label, Mr. Lady, that produces women's music. Gita Drury co-founded the Active Element Foundation, which redirects money generated by hip-hop to underserved communities. Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth (1991), co-founded the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership. Through Third Wave Direct Action, 120 young people registered over 20,000 new voters across the U.S. in the summer of 1992. These and many other examples demonstrate the profound impact the women's studies movement has had on young people's lives.
And it's not just for women. Its commitment to social justice attracts many men to women's studies courses and degrees. As Susan Faludi, author of Stiffed, says: "One of the gross misconceptions about feminism is that it's only about women. But in order for a woman to live freely, men have to live freely, too." Too often women's studies is mistakenly associated with identity politics rather than with research identity. But the fact is that women's studies scholarship and feminist analysis offer a profoundly new way of interpreting human experience.
