Is the whole concept of Women's Studies a definition of sexism?

Answer 1

Women's studies is a marxist concept brought to the US by fellow travelers such as Betty Friedan and other communist sympithisers. It seeks to upset the natural balance between men and women by creating fictional boogymen such as the male dominated society. It seeks to disrupt interpersonal relations that have grown western culture and a capitalist society to the detriment of all mankind. Avoid those witch doctors that preach it and follow your common sense when navigating relations between the sexes

Answer 2

Depends on why it's being studied. If it's for socio/political reasons...like incorrectly assuming that females are a minority and need/deserve special attention...then it's silly. Everytime I hear census data reported, females generally out-number males in the U.S. They may be under-represented in leadership positions, but this is a cultural shift that's correcting itself over time, and doesn't warrant focusing strictly on Women's Studies. Females have done a lot of great things in history. They should be included in any course of study along with every other person, regardless of gender or race. But IMO creating a Womens Studies department and focusing on just females in history is a waste of $$$ and valuable time for academia. The solution is to make all studies inclusive of major contributors. If you start making special studies of so-called minorities, then where do you draw the line?

Answer 3

There's nothing wrong with studying a single topic. For example, no one says that having a class in French is proof that Spanish is a lesser language. No one ever says that having a class in physics is wrong because it excludes biology.

However... the CONTENT of SOME programs is sexist.

But that doesn't mean that the concept of Women's Studies is inherently wrong.

And, "Men's Studies" wouldn't be wrong either, as long as it was taught in the same way as Women's Studies.

Answer 4

I agree that Women's Studies should be renamed "Gender Studies," because — let's face it — we do talk about men. However, it is primarily a study and celebration of the achievements of women, and not a male-bashing extravaganza, although many feminists (myself included) do enjoy some of that once in a while.

Answer 5

Sexism (or any -ism) is believing that one group is superior to another group based on a particular attribute. Sexism would be believing that one sex is superior to another. I've never seen any sexism in women's studies. It is just the study of women. That doesn't in any way imply that they are better than men.

Answer 6

NO, and neither is Black History Month. Minority's are often overlooked, and under studied in history and other social studies, in order to "equalize" the playing field, we need to rectify this ancient wrong.

Answer 7

Not if you're studying it because you are actually interested in learning about it.

Answer 8

It appears you know little about the scope of "Women's Studies". "Women's Studies" is completely interdisciplinary. You haven't explained what you mean by "a definition of sexism" so I will begin at Square One for you.

I have done some research on your behalf. Below you will see a sample offering of courses available from just ONE Women's Studies programme (at the graduate level) by an American university: peruse them at your leisure - this will illustrate to you the scope and breadth of courses you can expect to see:

Northeastern Graduate Courses : Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies Courses

Topics in American Literature (ENG G211)
Explores a significant topic in American literature. The topic for Fall 2006 is Multi-Ethnic Literature, Theory, and Pedagogy
Eighteenth-Century Novel (ENG G291)
Focuses on Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Walpole, Sterne, Beckford, and Austen.

Linguistics (ENG G311)
In much the same way that astronomers have begun to map out the structure of outer space, linguists have begun to map out the part of our mental space devoted to language. Their inquiry centers around several questions: What do people know when they know a language? How does that knowledge get there? How is it organized? This course concentrates on all three. We discover some of the that we unconsciously followas language users, which result in a new way of thinking about language. With this new perspective we move on to issues that are often the topic of social and political debates: gender in language, dialects, standards and attitudes, nature vs. nurture, among others.

Twentieth Century China (HST G227)
Assesses the impact of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 on state-societal relations. Initially focuses on the Mao era, particularly state-sponsored efforts to transform Chinese society through social mobilization campaigns, politcal culture, industrialization, and rural collectivization. Explores the impact of the economic reform policies initiated after 1978, emphasizing the social impact of globalizing economic forces, the rise of a consumer culture, the development of a legal system, and the ethnic relations between Han Chinese and minority populations, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang.

Issues/Problems in Public History (HST G237)
Examines and analyzes major problems in public history in the United States and the world. Topics include the nature and meaning of national memory and myth, the theory and practice of historic preservation, rural and land preservation and the organizational structures and activities associated with those efforts, the interrelationship of historical museums and popular culture, the history and organization of historic house museums, historical documentary filmmaking, historical archaeology in world perspective, interpreting “ordinary” landscapes, and the impact of politics on public history.

Enterprise Reporting (JRN G200)
Defines and sharpens research, interviewing, and analytical skills necessary for good reporting. Focuses on learning to develop story ideas and conduct primary and secondary research for a major enterprise article. Skills are developed through an analysis of outstanding reportage, in-class discussion and exercises, and out-of-class assignments.

Gender and Politics (POL G332)
Explores the roles of women in politics, with emphasis on the United States. Examines the traditional roles of women in politics, movements to attain equality for women in all spheres of public life, the woman as citizen and voter, the role of gender in achieving power and in political efficacy, and the place of women in contemporary politics. Also covers political action to promote women’s issues and modern feminism.

Gender, Sexuality and Culture (SOA G275)
Examines the construction of sexuality in western social sciences, its deconstruction by critics, and differential communities. Because the greatest challenges to western social scientific constructions of sexuality come from the margins of the dominant culture, the course pays close attention to nonheterosexual and nonwestern formulations of identity, experience, and lifestyle. Critically reads the work of Freud, Ellis, Kinsey, Margaret Mead, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault, feminist theorists, and others. Focuses on the experiences of people of color in the United States and in a range of other countries.

Race, Class and Gender (SOC G248)
Analyzes the intersection of race, class, and gender in women’s lives and their meaning for equality and feminism. Includes work by and about men. An interdisciplinary approach focuses on the socially constructed nature of these concepts, how they shape social life, and create meaning. Difference has become a central category for understanding our multicultural social life, underscoring inequality, stratification, and divergent life chances and experiences in the United States. Examines struggles to analyze gender, race, ethnicity, and class simultaneously and to grapple with issues including theory, autobiography, sociological data and analysis, and popular culture.

Contemporary Issues in Sociology: Ethnic, Racial and Religious Identity (SOC G256)
Discuss contemporary issues in sociology. Include supervised readings and written reports on special problems.
Race, Ethnicity and Health in the US (BHS G120)
Explores the role of economic, social, and individual factors in explaining racial and ethnic health disparities, and examines intervention approaches to eliminate them. Topics include genetic and social constructions of race and ethnicity, measuring race and ethnicity, and the differences in prevalence and patterns of disease across groups; cultural and structural factors that affect health-care delivery, such as discrimination, racism, and health status; and public health approaches to prevention and improving health-care delivery. Class activities include field work.

Introduction to Counseling (CAP G200)
Provides an overview of counseling and psychology from the ecological perspective. Covers the history, theories, and process of counseling across forces within psychology and across individuals (children and adults), groups, and families. Includes an introductions to counseling skills.
Understanding Culture and Diversity (CAP G203)
Works from a broad definition of culture and diversity. In addition to traditional culture and ethnic classifications, examines disability, poverty, and gender as culturally defining factors. Also explores the dynamics of culture in social systems, with the perspective of valuing differences in society and sociocultural forces impinging on culture from the ecological perspective.

Human Sexuality(CAP G222)
Designed for the twenty-first century and the critcal issues that have evolved in the field. Includes current information on issues in human sexuality (and acts as a forum for the discussion of current trends), which may include HIV/AIDS, abortion, ethics and morality in genetic engineering, personal behaviors, social aspects of acquaintance rape, early sexual experiences, divorce, and remarriage. Allows for the development of counseling skills needed to deal with various issues.
Family Counseling (CAP G240)
Addresses the family as a system within an ecological context. Covers parent counseling, the school and family as interactive systems, and school-parent collaboration. Also considers families in early intervention and other family-school interventions.

Seminar in Feminist Psychology (CAP G380)
Looks at sex-gender socialization and role ascription in the development of women and men. Examines feminine and masculine gender role stereotypes and constructs in mental health theory, procedures, and practices. Introduces the variety of feminist standpoints and explores their impacts on the conceptualization of health and healing. Presents major points in feminist therapy and psychology. The student examines selected areas in-depth within this course.

History and Systems of Psychology (CAP G390)
Examines the development of psychological theories in the context of western intellectual development. Attends to the underlying epistemological assumptions and historical and cultural forces on psychology. Also emphasizes some of the potential contributions to psychology of other world civilizations and to paradigmatic strengths and limits.

Nursing with Women and Families (NUR G088)
Emphasizes the promotion of health for women and their families. Self-care and empowerment are an integral focus in examining women's health from a developmental perspective. The nursing process provides the framework for students to assess and therapeutically intervene in promoting healthy childbearing and the health of the woman during the life span. Emphasis is on caregiving of the woman, the fetus, and the infant within the family environment. Concepts of human development of individual, family, and community form the context in examining the caregiving role of the professional nurse. Discusses the effect of cultural, social, economic, and ethical influences as well as the impact of health-care technology.
You can also view these courses at: Registrar

GRADUATE CONSORTIUM IN WOMEN'S STUDIES- COURSES

Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies

A writing workshop for dissertation writers at all levels, beginning with preparation of the proposal. Class will include rotating discussion in each meeting of pre-circulated material by one or two students. In addition to a constructive critique of your writing, we will focus on: theoretical and methodological concepts in Women's and Gender Studies across disciplines; research, argumentation, and writing; practical matters such as: the Dissertation Committee, looking toward eventual publication, and writing with an eye to a professional position. Enrollment is limited to *ten* students.

ERICA HARTH is Professor Emerita (as of 2005) of Humanities and Women's Studies at Brandeis University. Her original scholarly field is early modern French literature and culture. Among her several published books in this field is Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); and she is the author of numerous articles and essays. Her most recent book is an edited collection of original essays, which she commissioned, on the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans (New York: St. Martins/Palgrave, 2001 and 2003).
Note: This workshop meets thirteen times over two semesters.

Feminist Inquiry: Strategies for Effective Scholarship
This course investigates theories and practices of feminist inquiry across a range of disciplines. Doing feminist research involves rethinking disciplinary assumptions and methodologies, developing new understandings of what counts as knowledge, seeking alternative ways of understanding the origins of problems/issues, formulating new ways of asking questions and redefining the relationship between subjects and objects of study. The course will focus on methodology, i.e., the theory and analysis of how research should proceed. We shall be especially attentive to epistemological issues--pre-suppositions about the nature of knowledge. What makes research distinctively feminist lies in the complex connections between epistemologies, methodologies and research methods? We shall explore how these connections are formed in the traditional disciplines and raise questions about why they are inadequate and/or problematic for feminist inquiry and what, specifically, are the feminist critiques of these intersections.
MODHUMITA ROY is associate professor of English and Director of the undergraduate Women's Studies program at Tufts University.

JILL McLEAN TAYLOR, Ed.D. is associate professor of Education and Women's Studies at Simmons College, and chair of Women's Studies. She is also the project coordinator of GEAR UP, a six-year partnership between Simmons, Suffolk, and the English High School. She is co-author with Carol Gilligan and Amy Sullivan of 'Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship' , and co-editor with Carol Gilligan and Janie Ward of 'Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological theory and Education'.

Gender, Politics, and Nationalism
This course will investigate the myriad ways that religion, race, and color affect women's lives within national and transnational contexts. Specifically, this course explores the contested relationship between women and nationalist, religious, and racial/color politics in the context of South Asia and the Caribbean. It will investigate ways in which gender, religious and racial identities intersect with ethnic and national ones in the emergence of social movements. Further, the course will examine the multiple ways religiosity, nationality, feminism, and political perspective are constructed, experienced, and practiced, and highlight the complex ways in which they inform one another. It seeks to examine ways in which nationalist politics has created opportunities for women's activism while simultaneously undermining their autonomy, and to complicate and explore how nation-states define and use women and how these citizens/agents negotiate these definitions and uses.
Specific topics addressed include: the relationship of gender to nationalism and formation of nation-states, and nationalist movements, women's participation in national movements and anti-colonial struggles, effects of globalization, development, and transnational institutions; and the interrelation of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and religion in national identity constructions.
ELORA H. CHOWDHURY is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her areas of interest include critical development studies, Third World/transnational feminisms, gender and social movements in South Asia, and feminist ethnography.

RHONDA FREDERICK (Associate Professor, English) teaches Caribbean and African American literatures at Boston College. She is also interested in American literatures, particularly 20th Century women's fiction, science fiction and fantasy, detective/mystery fiction, and literatures of the African Diaspora. Her research interests include Caribbean and Post-colonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and narratives of migration. Through a research fellowship funded by the NEH/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Harlem, New York), she completed a manuscript that examines Caribbean literature's recurrent figure of the Panam� Canal worker, entitled "Col�n Man a Come": Mythographies of Panam� Canal Migration (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Gender, Armed Conflict, and Peacemaking
Peace Keeping operations involving both military and civilian personnel have been deployed in a number of countries such as Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan. These interventions have come about following intense levels of violence, breakdown in law and order, systems of governance and social systems as well as violations of human rights. This course is designed to review the phenomena of conflict, forced migration and militarization from a gender perspective to highlight the policy and operational implications that arise from this analysis.

The gendered nature of conflict and intervention will be explored from a multi-disciplinary framework involving anthropology, sociology, policy analysis, philosophy and the arts. Presenters will utilize literature, poetry, film, witness testimonies from the field, ethnographic narratives and other resources to explore the complex ways in which women and men experience, manage and respond to violence and situations of protracted crisis.

CAROL COHN is the Director of the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights. Her research and writing has focused on gender and international security, ranging from work on discourse of civilian defense intellectuals, gender integration issues in the US military, and, most extensively, weapons of mass destruction. Her most recent research examines gender mainstreaming in international peace and security institutions; a central focus is the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, and the on-going efforts to ensure its implementation at the international and grassroots levels.
GORDANA RABRENOVIC is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Associate Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University. Her substantive specialties include community studies, urban education and inter group conflict and violence. Her most recent book is Why We Hate (2004) co-authored with Jack Levin.
LISA RIVERA is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her areas of specialization are moral and political theory, feminist philosophy and ethics in international affairs. Her recent work defends transnational rights to subsistence and considers moral responsibility in war.

Gender, Race, and the Construction of the American West, 1880 - 1945
This course explores the historical experiences and cultural productions of women in the North American West during the time it was being explored, settled, and imagined. Challenging the myths of western expansion as an exclusively male endeavor, and the formation of western myth and enterprise as exclusively male domains, the course pays particular attention to the roles of women in promoting, resisting, transforming, and constructing the trans-Mississippi West as reality and imaginary.
The North American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides a fascinating case study of the shifting meanings of gender, race, citizenship, and power in border societies. As the site of migration, settlement, and displacement, it spawned contests over land, labor disputes, inter-ethnic conflicts and peaceful relations, and many kinds of cultural productions.

KAREN V. HANSEN is Professor of Sociology & Women's and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. She teaches courses on feminist theory, historical methods, and families. Her research on the upper Great Plains analyzes the relationships between Scandinavian immigrants and the Dakota people at the turn of the twentieth century. She has published Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care for Children and A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England , and co-edited two anthologies, Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics and Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination.

MARILYNN S. JOHNSON is Professor of History at Boston College where she teaches modern U.S. social history and the history of the American West. She is the author of The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II and Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City . In 2002 she was co-curator of "Cowboys, Indians and the Big Picture," an exhibition of western art at the McMullen Museum at Boston College. She is currently completing an edited collection entitled Violence in the American West: The Mining and Range Wars.

LOIS RUDNICK is Professor of English and American Studies, and director of the American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on Immigration and Multi-Ethnic History and Literature, and on Modern American Literature and Culture. She has published widely on modern American culture, on the literature and arts of New Mexico, and on American Studies pedagogy. Her books include American Identities: An Introductory Textbook ; Ma bel Dodge Luhan: New Woman New Worlds ; Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture , and 1915, the Cultural Moment: the New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America , edited with Adele Heller.

Source(s):

http://www.womensstudies.neu.edu/graduat...