Phase 1: Creating a New Discipline

Women's studies as a distinct entity within academe first appeared over two decades ago, in 1969–70, with the establishment of the first program at San Diego State University. In Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women's Studies, a textbook widely used in introductory women's studies classes, Sheila Ruth reminds her readers of the lofty objective of early women's studies courses and programs: to transform teaching and research about women by unmasking the masculine bias in the history of knowledge. The mission was to change women's sense of themselves, their aspirations, and the realities of their lives; to alter the relations between women and men; and to eradicate all manifestations of unequal power and privilege based on race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and class.

Thirteen years after that first women's studies program was begun at San Diego State, Catharine Stimpson, in the report she submitted to the Ford Foundation in 1982, described the objectives of women's studies as 1) deconstructing the errors about history, society, and culture that male bias has created; 2) reconstructing knowledge and adding knowledge about women and gender; 3) providing the catalyst for parallel acts of advocacy to bring women into institutions and educational professions; and 4) producing overarching ideas, concepts, paradigms, and theories. At the time Stimpson wrote her report, women's studies was perhaps the most successful result of the second wave of the 20th-century women's movement, its success clearly manifested by the expansion from 17 courses about women in U.S. colleges or universities in 1969 to 20,000 courses and over 300 programs by 1982. This represented enormous growth in 13 years.

This tremendous expansion of women's studies and the achievement of many of its goals, as evidenced by the number of courses, the proliferation of programs offering majors and minors, and obvious student interest as reflected in enrollment figures, must be acknowledged. But as Florence Howe cautioned in 1982:

Although by the mid-1970s, over 5,000 courses on women were offered and over 300 women's studies programs had been established on campuses throughout the United States, feminist scholarship still occupied the margins of the androcentric academy, reaching only a small audience of students in courses outside the "mainstream."