When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America

In this text, the author traces the successes and failures of women's studies, 25 years after the establishment of the first women's studies programme. She examines the field's induring impact on the world of higher education and concludes that the rise of women's studies has challenged the university in the same way that feminism has challenged society at large. Setting women's studies in the larger context of American higher education during a century of women's efforts to gain equality in the academic professions, Boxer narrates the history of the field and explores the philosophical and political goal of its practitioners. She examines the present status of women's studies in various types of institutions and traces the impact of a quarter century of feminist scholarship, teaching and academic advocacy since the founding of the first such programme at San Diego State University in 1970. She also comments on the field's increasing international presence. Drawing on experience as a historian, feminist, academic adminstrator and former chair of a women's studies programme, Boxer observes that by working for justice - and for changes necessary to make the attainment of justice a practical possibility - women's studies ensures that women are heard in the processes and places where knowledge is created, taught and preserved. The intellectual transformation behind the emergence of women's studies, Boxer concludes, is one of historic proportions. She asserts that, in common with other great moments in human experience, it has given rise to a flowering of art, literature and science, and to the challenging of previously accepted authorities of text and tradition.