Preface
In May
1991, I was invited by L. Steven Zwerling, a program officer in the
Ford Foundation's Education and Culture program, to prepare a
report, "The Status of Women's Studies, 1969–92," which would
assess the development of this interdisciplinary field over the
past two and a half decades and suggest directions for its future.
My initial report followed by 10 years Prof. Catharine R.
Stimpson's 1982 assessment, which was published by the Ford
Foundation in 1986 as Women's Studies in the United States.
The Stimpson report examined the history of the Foundation's
commitment to women's studies, from the advent of support for
faculty and doctoral fellowships for research on women in 1972 to
later grants to centers for research on women in a variety of
institutional contexts. The report also underscored the need for
continued assistance for "mainstreaming" women's studies into the
core curriculum but cautioned against neglecting discrete women's
studies programs.
The purpose of
this report is to ascertain the current status of women's studies
nationally; describe the evolution of women's studies programming
at the Foundation since 1982; analyze major curriculum developments
sparked by black studies, ethnic studies, and women's studies over
the past two decades and identify pioneers and scholars in these
fields; discuss new directions for women's studies; and provide
recommendations for funding and general support of women's
studies.
Although a
number of questions provided a framework for my inquiry, the report
does not attempt to answer them in any direct way. Rather, the
questions are useful because they suggest ways of approaching a
retrospective on a relatively new field of study about which so
many different points of view have emerged since its inception.
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Has women's
studies altered the major disciplines, especially in the humanities
and social sciences?
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Has the new
scholarship on women and feminist critiques of the disciplines had
an impact on the "canon" in these fields?
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Has women's
studies created a new canon that is also exclusionary and
insensitive to multiple voices and nondominant
discourses?
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Is feminist
theory sufficiently inclusive?