From The Director

Lately I have been reflecting on the history of Women’s Studies and the UW System Women’s Studies Consortium. As most reading this know, Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that places women and questions of gender at the center of scholarly and creative inquiry. The field emphasizes the important role that gender plays in shaping both male and female experiences and how the experiences and understandings that grow out of women's lives often continue to be left out of traditional approaches to knowledge. The field emphasizes that gender is fundamentally linked to class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and sexual orientation, and, with them, help to shape and construct our sense of self, our roles in society and our institutions. The goals of Women's Studies Programs are most often to encourage students to develop an understanding about the ways in which society thinks about gender by attaining the analytical, oral and writing skills needed to think about the interconnection and nuanced interactions of all these forces in society. Through feminist teaching, learning, research, scholarship, and creativity, the primary aim is to engage students in a field that provides tools that can help them to shape their lives and the world around them.

While the UW System Women’s Studies Consortium has been in existence as the office charged with bringing to together UW Women’s Studies Programs, resources, and collaborative efforts since 1989, Women's studies in higher education was first conceived as an academic area apart from other departments in the late 1970s. The story of Women’s Studies varies from campus to campus in the UW System. An interesting vivid narrative exists as a digital version of a book outlining the history of Women’s Studies in the University of Wisconsin System, Transforming Women’s Education, can be found here: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?id=UW.WomenEdu

While it is increasingly common to find faculty who have had the advantage of completing undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs in Women’s Studies, many who teach in Women’s Studies come from traditional disciplines where they have developed feminist perspectives, methodologies, and pedagogical strategies that come together to create the interdisciplinary field of Women’s Studies. The professional organization that brings Women’s Studies faculty, scholars, students and activists together is the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). Established in 1977, NWSA leads the field of women’s studies in educational and social transformation. NWSA has more than 2,000 individual and institutional members worldwide.

A useful recent publication of the organization that reflects the current state of the field is Mapping Women’s and Gender Studies Data Collection. The National Women's Studies Association established its Mapping Women’s and Gender Studies project to collect data that could provide a comprehensive portrait of WS programs and how they manifest themselves in different U.S. institutions of higher education. There are 652 women’s and gender studies programs at community colleges, colleges, and universities in the U.S. based upon survey responses

· Undergraduate women’s studies courses enrolled nearly 89,000 students in 2005-06, and 85% of women’s and gender studies courses fulfilled general education requirements

· Undergraduate majors enrolled nearly 4,300 students, while undergraduate minors enrolled nearly 10,500 students in 2005-06

· Graduate courses had a total enrollment of nearly 2,700, with 1,076 students registered in doctoral courses in 2005-06

· 30.4% of women’s studies faculty are faculty of color, compared with 19% of faculty nationally based upon a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 2003 report on post-secondary faculty at degree-granting institutions

The full report contains additional information about how the survey was conducted, curricular offerings, faculty, program administration, and program budgets. It can be found here: http://www.nwsa.org/projects/database/index.php

As we enter the post election 2008 period of what we hope we will a time of continued transformation, in higher education and beyond, it will be a good thing to notice what has worked well in the past and think about how we can effectively continue this work in the future. A couple of good places to begin to do that will be at the joint Wisconsin Women’s Studies and LGBTQ Conference in Madison in April, and at the national NWSA Conference in Atlanta in November. Details of both are in the announcement lists below.

I hope to see you both places!

Helen R. Klebesadel

Director,

University of Wisconsin System

Women’s Studies Consortium