The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers (Women's studies history) - Softcover

Críticas

"Now let us praise the famous and not-so-famous academic-activists who founded women's studies as a vital discipline within the humanities and higher education! A marvelous series of individual accounts by pioneering feminists captures and exhilaration of past achievements, of future challenges." --Susan Gubar, coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic

"These narratives clearly reveal clarity of purpose and superb organizational skills, punctuated by flashes of humor, as women's studies' founding mothers devised and implemented subversive and creative means to their transformational ends. How fortunate the world of feminist research and teaching is to have this first-hand testimony and reflection on the origins of women's studies, even as it moves into a new century." --Toni A. H. McNaron, author of Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia

"The Politics of Women's Studies is an extraordinary collection that takes me back to the 1970s and the struggle to find a place for black women in the curriculum, to the excitement of the 1977 founding convention of the National Women's Studies Association where I stood in arms with the emerging women of color caucus, and to the heady days of the 1980s" --Patricia Bell-Scott, co-editor of But Some of Us Are Brave

Reseña del editor

In the patriarchal halls of 1970s academe, women who spoke their minds risked their careers. Yet intrepid women—students, faculty, administrators, members of the community—persisted in collaborating to form women's studies. In doing so, they created a movement that altered curricula and teaching styles, and shifted paradigms and content across disciplines.

These original essays by "founding mothers" feature a diversity of voices: young graduate students or new PhD's just beginning to teach and untenured; tenured professors in search of ways to improve their students' capacities to learn; older, veteran academics at last witnessing change; and even a few administrators. In all of these programs, founders grappled not only with issues of gender, but with those of class, race, and sexuality, in a decade infused with political unrest and questioning, when civil rights and anti-war activism, as well as feminism, shaped academic worlds.