Phase 2: Entering the Mainstream

If the establishment of women's studies as a separate discipline during the late 1960s and 1970s can be called Phase 1, the 1980s ushered in Phase 2 and, perhaps, the "coming of age" of the women's studies movement in the academy. As Florence Howe wrote in 1982:

The major thrust of the second decade will be toward directing the movement outward, toward "mainstreaming." Despite a decade of new scholarship, women's studies has so far made little progress toward its "ultimate strategy" of transforming the established male-biased curriculum.

In Transforming the Curriculum, Johnnella Butler makes a distinction between "balancing, mainstreaming, and integration," which she indicates is the old "add-and-stir" approach (popularized by Elizabeth Minnich), and "transformation," which, Butler says, calls for radical paradigm shifts. This process of bringing about a gender-balanced curriculum represents an attempt to deghettoize women's studies and to incorporate it into the rest of the academic enterprise. The objective has been to incorporate basic feminist scholarship or the new scholarship on women within all of the disciplines by initiating curriculum transformation projects in diverse academic settings throughout the country. If these "mainstreaming" efforts (still controversial within women's studies circles) were successful, Myra Dinnerstein writes, "some feminist scholars... expected that women's studies would be so integrated into the disciplines that there would be no need for separate programs or specialties and... we would just fade away." Most women's studies advocates continue to argue, however, that dual strategies are still imperative: Separate women's studies courses, many of which are now highly specialized, must exist alongside gender-balanced courses within the disciplines. Like many women's studies specialists, I see the "mainstreaming" projects and the development of autonomous women's studies courses/programs as very different efforts, both important in their own right and both essential.

One of the earliest and in some ways more successful of these curriculum integration projects in women's studies was conducted at the University of Arizona beginning in 1981; it was initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and later by the Ford Foundation under the auspices of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW).