FOREWORD

In 1986 the Ford Foundation published a special report entitled Women's Studies in the United States. It was written by Catharine R. Stimpson, the founding editor of Signs, a scholarly journal about women in culture and society. The report assessed the Ford Foundation's work in the field of women's studies. That work began in 1972 with a national program of faculty and doctoral dissertation fellowships and grew through the mid-1980s, when the focus of Foundation support shifted to those helping to get the results of women's studies research into the hands of policy makers and incorporated into the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. The Stimpson report also traced the development of the field of women's studies and tied it to other efforts to reform higher education, as well as to the wider women's movement.

The Stimpson report became an important document in the history of women's studies in the United States. It provided a concise narrative of how this new interdisciplinary field of scholarship emerged, and it plotted the major debates among women's studies scholars. These debates focused on such matters as whether social conditioning is the basis for gender differences or whether one can define feminism in any global sense.

Now, nearly 10 years later, the debates continue, but they are no longer on the margins of the disciplines or only in separate women's studies programs. Fields such as literature, history, sociology, anthropology, and biology have revised their course offerings to take account of gender and the roles and contributions of women. For example, before 1970, the woman usually included in the American literature canon was Emily Dickinson. In British literature, few women poets were given attention, and the women writers whose work was most often covered were Jane Austen and George Eliot. Today, the major mainstream anthologies in both British and American literature include at least one-third women writers. To gain another perspective on the degree of change in scholarship, one has only to consult the college course catalogues of major colleges and universities before 1970 and contrast them with their 1990 versions. One would discover that the academic landscape has been altered remarkably.

Women's studies has indeed broadened and deepened. One important feature of scholarship in the field in the last decade has been the emergence of the distinct and diverse voices of women of color. These scholars virtually