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The early advocates for women's studies pursued two goals simultaneously: They revolutionized research by finding new topics, with new methods, using new theories, then launched courses and programs to transmit these findings, doing it all with an interdisciplinary perspective.
In general, the large public universities fostered feminist scholarship and established women's studies programs first. Many regional universities and liberal-arts colleges set up programs soon thereafter. The single-sex schools, male and female, came later to women's studies. In the process of becoming a recognized discipline on any campus with majors, tenured faculty members, and degree programs, a shift occurred. Over the past four decades, women's studies began to look like other disciplines, hunkering down into a familiar academic pattern with specialized language, a focus on selected topics, and increasingly separated from other disciplines. Its evolution is neither surprising nor alarming.
Some future foci are clear. Women's studies will continue to engage more and more global material. It will continue to analyze women in all their multiple dimensions. It will continue to ask questions about institutional patterns that negate women's presence—especially when the practice of placing a few women in prominent positions appears to negate the invisibility of most women.
Other future directions are less clear and may depend on at least three factors. One is the campus context: Each women's studies program nationally or internationally grows out of its own context. A second is the shifting nature of higher education, increasingly corporate and preprofessional. A third comes from the internal dynamics of the field itself and the second and third generation of scholars who will lead it. There are likely to be as many answers as there are programs, campuses, and scholars as we move farther into the twenty-first century.
One distinctive characteristic of women's studies as a field has been how campus-specific each program is. Every program, its faculty and curriculum, grew out of the situation of women on that campus—and each continues to be shaped by it. Thus, at a major research university like the University of Michigan, with its long history of social-science research and system of interdisciplinary funding, women's studies has an outstanding, multidimensional global-activism project. Documenting the activities of leaders of the women's movement around the world enables scholars to compare the first wave of feminism in the U.S. and Europe with later waves around the globe. Such diversity, while healthy, makes generalizations across programs difficult.
Contemporary higher education is under financial stress, stress that leads to larger classes and more teaching and service by adjunct faculty members. Elite institutions rely on international star faculty members who negotiate time away from the classroom. Under these and similar conditions, how do undergraduate students get the classroom time and space to develop the self-knowledge and reflective capacity that have been the hallmark of women's studies? What about the gendered dynamics of all classrooms?
Some universities, like Cal Poly or Virginia Tech, continue to address these core concerns by sponsoring projects on women in science, mathematics, and engineering. Using the insights of humanities and social-science research to investigate the status of women in the natural sciences, the projects they sponsor demonstrate the continued need to investigate women's lives throughout the life cycle and across boundaries of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.
Disciplinary specialization is a hallmark of maturity in a field—and simultaneously a challenge for a field's future. As a field becomes refined, does it—should it—stay in conversation with other fields? How does it interpret its own history? What priorities are given to theoretical development, teaching effectiveness, campus presence? The facile answer is that a department can do all three. The reality is more complex: On some campuses, this conversation about the relationships among foundations, evolution, and current priorities is vibrant; on others, marginalized; on some, ignored.
Nationally, women's studies began in 1969. A forty-year-old discipline is a young discipline. It will take another twenty-five years for women's studies to make meaning of its life experiences and achieve the status of a wise elder in the academy.
