December 8, 2000

The future of women's studies

This October, I had the pleasure of attending a national conference called "The Future of Women's Studies" at the University of Arizona. This conference comes at an auspicious time in American higher education, a time when women's studies has been firmly instituted as a legitimate academic discipline, and when detractors of the field announce that we have now entered a period of post-feminism where the goals of the Women's Liberation Movement have been reached and gender equality need no longer be struggled for.

The conference was designed to bring together feminist theorists and activists, teachers and community workers, and faculty from research universities with Ph.D. programs in women's studies and fledgling programs at smaller schools such as Loyola. There, we reflected on women's studies' past and raised questions about assessment and planned the future of women's studies. The program is an academic discipline whose goals encompass the creation of new knowledges and theories about women, gender, and the social and turns them into a tool for liberation that will bring about equality and put an end to oppression based on gender. More specifically, we asked ourselves how can the work of the academy be applied to our communities, and how can community needs become part of our academic agenda for the 21st century?

What impressed me most about all the talks I listened to and all of the workshops I attended is the incredible resilience of women's studies as an academic discipline and the dedication its practitioners bring to the field. Women's studies faculty actively seek to combineoften in contradiction with their institutionstheory and praxis, enabling students to make critical connections between the personal and the political and to extend their academic knowledge into hands-on experience. While conceptual and theoretical differences persistthey, in fact, keep the field intellectually stimulating and alivefeminist methodology and praxis are here to build their own discipline and to transform the traditional disciplines. Service and community learning, discourse analysis, the deconstruction of terms such as woman and gender, and a materialist analysis of how gender works to systematically disadvantage women continue to be part of the larger work that still lies ahead of women's studies and that will help to shape its future.

As the world is turning into a global marketplace where women will function in increasing numbers as laborers and consumers, Women's Studies and feminist theory remain the intellectual paradigms that will help us to understand this dynamic and how these transformations will impact the lives of women here and abroad. The work of women's studies is far from over; in fact, it has barely begun.

Susanne B. Dietzel, Ph. D., Director, Women's Resource Center