This, at first, four-year, cross-disciplinary project developed an interdisciplinary format that provided a model for subsequent curriculum integration projects; its founding director, Myra Dinnerstein, also became highly regarded nationally and is considered a pioneer in feminist curriculum integration.

A steering committee of women's studies faculty (critical to the success of such an undertaking) designed and conducted seminars for analyzing "major texts" in feminist theory and discussing pedagogy in women's studies. A firm grounding in feminist theory (limited for the most part to the writings of white women) was a major objective of these seminars, which were targeted to largely white, tenured male faculty because it was believed that this would have a more permanent impact on the curriculum. The participating faculty (45 from 13 departments) received either a stipend or released time for participating in the yearlong project and were required to revise at least one course for inclusion of content by and about women. Faculty participants also consulted during the revision process with feminist specialists in their various disciplines, read widely under supervision with women's studies specialists, and by the end of the project had revised syllabi for 80 courses—an ambitious and impressive undertaking.

Numerous curriculum integration projects followed. Perhaps the best-known of these took place at Wheaton College in 1980 under the aegis of a three-year grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), which assumed a leadership role in such projects. The college-wide goal was to integrate the new scholarship on women in introductory courses. In 1983 Wheaton convened the first national conference on curriculum integration.

FIPSE also funded efforts by Smith College's Afro-American Studies Department and the University of Massachusetts' Women's Studies Program to conduct the first curriculum development project to bridge the chasm between black studies and women's studies. Johnnella Butler's essay "Complicating the Question: Black Studies and Women's Studies" gives a detailed description of the project that includes an appendix containing lists of courses addressing issues of race, gender, and culture and of faculty who taught those courses. One of the lessons derived from the project was that black participants (men and women) resented faulty analogies between the experiences of blacks and those of white women. They were opposed to comparing the black experience of "double consciousness" (which Du Bois conceptualized in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903) with the experience of "otherness" (which Simone de Beauvoir conceptualized in The Second Sex in 1949); they felt that while white women experience oppression, they "are nevertheless served by white American culture; they benefit from racial privilege."