When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America

Boxer, Marilyn Jacoby

ISBN 10: 0801858348 / ISBN 13: 9780801858345

Editore: The Johns Hopkins UP,, 1998

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Hardback. Fine. xix + 360pp.

Codice articolo C11265

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America
• Editore: The Johns Hopkins UP,
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0801858348
• ISBN 13: 9780801858345
• Rilegatura: Rilegato
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • Women's History
  • Twentieth Century

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

In this text, the author traces the successes and failures of women's studies, 25 years after the establishment of the first women's studies programme. She examines the field's induring impact on the world of higher education and concludes that the rise of women's studies has challenged the university in the same way that feminism has challenged society at large. Setting women's studies in the larger context of American higher education during a century of women's efforts to gain equality in the academic professions, Boxer narrates the history of the field and explores the philosophical and political goal of its practitioners. She examines the present status of women's studies in various types of institutions and traces the impact of a quarter century of feminist scholarship, teaching and academic advocacy since the founding of the first such programme at San Diego State University in 1970. She also comments on the field's increasing international presence. Drawing on experience as a historian, feminist, academic adminstrator and former chair of a women's studies programme, Boxer observes that by working for justice - and for changes necessary to make the attainment of justice a practical possibility - women's studies ensures that women are heard in the processes and places where knowledge is created, taught and preserved. The intellectual transformation behind the emergence of women's studies, Boxer concludes, is one of historic proportions. She asserts that, in common with other great moments in human experience, it has given rise to a flowering of art, literature and science, and to the challenging of previously accepted authorities of text and tradition.

Recensione

"Boxer is well-qualified to write this first comprehensive intellectual history of women's studies. A complex and thoughtful volume accompanied by an enticing bibliography; both should be required reading for graduate students and faculty in many fields." -- Lynn D. Gordon, History of Education Quarterly

"Boxer offers an enlightening examination of the political, social, intellectual, and cultural debates that initiated and informed the institutionalization of women's studies scholarship and programs in American higher education." -- Mary Ann Dzuback, Journal of American History

"This book is enormously valuable as a history of the first twenty-five years of women's studies within the larger context of higher education in the United States. The research is strong, the analysis clear and forceful." -- Mari Jo Buhle, American Historical Review

"Marilyn Boxer brings her vast experience as a founding feminist scholar, women's studies chair, and university provost to her definitive rendering of the history of women's studies within the larger context of late-twentieth-century U.S. higher education." -- Patrice McDermott, Signs