Women's Studies: Theory and Practice

youth and denied the honors of the older and more definitely outlined disciplines of the mind. Its very title of 'discipline' is contested by many educational leaders. Yet at least women's studies is a daring and masterful combination of accepted [disciplines] : of biology, ethnology, psychology, history, economics, and politics. As such it is offering its new explanation of many ancient riddles of life and its still newer gospel of social control. ... It not only boldly shows 'why we are so' but why and how we should become something different. . . .x When she wrote this in 1913, Anna Spencer was describing not the new discipline of women's studies, but the brand new and then rather suspect field of sociology. Wherever she used the term sociology, I have substituted women's studies, not to compare the two disciplines as disciplines, but just to point out that the content and techniques of sociology that were considered dubious in 1912 we now consider acceptable and sometimes even divinely ordained. So much so that any university that did not offer a program in sociology today would be considered beneath contempt. But sixty years ago sociology faced problems similar to those that women's studies faces today. Women's studies, too, is not considered by some academics to be quite legitimate as part of a college curriculum. In response to this, one might say simply that the definition of is itself political, that the notion of legitimacy is a strategy to keep the in-people in, and the out-people out. I myself see no reason why a full semester course on D. H. Lawrence is for some