It is also important to recall the early history of women's studies on many campuses. The situation at the University of New Mexico, where women's studies began in 1972, was not atypical. At that university, a few graduate students and faculty women assumed the administration of women's studies on a voluntary basis, without a recognized program, coordinator, or adequate funding; in 1973–74, there was $50 for supplies, and a part-time, work-study student was supported with a $100 donation. What was atypical of this early initiative, however, was its attention to third-world women. For example, among the four beginning courses offered in 1973 was one entitled La Mujer Chicana. Early agenda items included identifying ways in which ethnic issues could be incorporated into the women's studies curriculum and the hiring of minority women faculty. I would argue that this is attributable to the university's location in the Southwest and its consequent sensitivity to cultural differences among women.

The February 1989 issue of Women's Review of Books contains a series of articles on "the state of our art," entitled "Women's Studies at Twenty." This retrospective and introspective assessment was written by a number of feminist academicians, among them Evelyn Torton Beck, Johnnella Butler, Myra Dinnerstein, Linda Garber, Florence Howe, Paula Rothenberg, Susan Searing, and Catharine Stimpson. The fundamental question probed by this chorus of women with divergent points of view and varying preoccupations is whether the feminist scholarship generated over the past 20 years has in fact transformed the disciplines as it had hoped to do. Has there been "a reconstruction of the basic core concepts of the disciplines"?

Despite the fact that women's studies has "come of age," Evelyn Torton Beck argues in "Asking for the Future" that women's studies programs are still trivialized, marginally funded, and not taken seriously. She advocates that women's studies finally be recognized as an autonomous discipline and be given departmental status and its own tenure lines (which her home institution, the University of Maryland at College Park, has done). Beck feels this is especially urgent, both because the current practice of programs' borrowing faculty from various departments to teach women's studies courses does not work well and because departmental status would enhance graduate education in women's studies. She goes on to argue that women's studies faculty are like cows, providing services to the university and getting little return for their Herculean efforts. Among the ways that women's studies has helped reform the university is through its inclusive curriculum, its student-centered pedagogy, and its linking of theory and practice—though Beck points out that women's studies has not been credited sufficiently for its contributions to higher education.

In "Women's Studies at Twenty," Myra Dinnerstein reminds readers that