Despite the important, even transformative work of the women's studies movement since its inception in 1969, many advocates, particularly women of color and lesbians, have found themselves discontented with and frustrated by continued assertions of universal sisterhood. In the late 1970s, black women began to critique both women's studies and curriculum integration projects for their relative lack of attention to questions of racial/ethnic, class, or cultural difference in definitions of womanhood. At the same time, lesbian feminists critiqued institutionalized heterosexism and the relative invisibility of lesbian experience within the new scholarship on women. Johnnella Butler, now professor of ethnic studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, who codirected the first curriculum integration project at the University of Massachusetts between women's studies and ethnic studies, asserted, "Women are separated from each other by race, class, ethnic group, religion, nationality, and culture so that they appear to share more of a common identity with men of their own immediate group than with women outside the group." One of the hardest-hitting critiques of the insensitivity of women's studies to race, class, and ethnicity can be found in the pioneering work of black feminist theorist bell hooks:

Our [black feminist scholars] collective work... made it possible for individuals active in the feminist movement to demand that women's studies courses acknowledge that they claimed to be talking and teaching about women, when the actual subjects of study were white women. This was an important breakthrough, which has had and continues to have profound impact on feminist movement and feminist scholarship in the United States. However, the insistence on recognizing differences among women and of ways the intersection of race, sex, and class determine the nature of female subjectivity, has not sufficiently altered hierarchical structures within women's studies and feminist scholarship. Most programs continue to focus central attention on white women, as though they represent all women, subordinating discussions of black women and other nonwhite groups.

Within the past two decades, a new field of study—black women's studies—has emerged, in part because of the failure of either black studies or women's studies to address adequately the unique experiences of women of African descent in the United States and throughout the world. This field has