This image is the cover for the book Politics of Women's Studies

Politics of Women's Studies

The true stories of those bold women who espoused feminism in the world of academia and forever changed our educational system and culture.

In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers. Yet intrepid women—students, faculty, administrators, members of the community—persisted in collaborating on women’s studies programs. In doing so, they created a movement that altered paradigms, curricula, teaching styles, and content across disciplines.

In these original essays “we hear the voices of feminists exhilarated by the opportunities and challenges of creating women’s studies programs in American colleges and universities, nurtured by the women’s movement of the 1970s,” from young graduate students and newly hired faculty to tenured professors in search of ways to improve their students’ capacities to learn, veteran academics at last witnessing change, and even a few administrators (Library Journal).

In all of these programs, these “founding mothers” grappled not only with issues of gender, but with those of class, race, and sexuality in a decade infused with political unrest and questioning, when civil rights and anti-war activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds.

Florence Howe, Mari Jo Buhle

FLORENCE HOWE became closely involved with the women's movement after her active participation in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. She functioned as historian and record-keeper of the women's studies movement during the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to serving as professor of English at Goucher College and the College at Old Westbury/SUNY. As director and publisher of The Feminist Press at CUNY, and through her teaching, writing, lecturing, and consulting on several hundred campuses in the United States, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, she has become a major contributor to change in higher education. She is author of Myths of Coeducation. MARI JO BUHLE is chair of the history department at Brown University and a past recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award. She is the author of Feminism and Its Discontents and Women and American Socialism and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left and Out of Many: A History of the American People.

The Feminist Press at CUNY