INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN'S STUDIES
| This course introduces students to women's studies, a field of scholarship dedicated to the inclusion of women's experiences and feminist perspectives in the academy. In the first part of the class, we will examine women's historical exclusion from education and then trace black and white women's fight for education in the U.S. in order to place the emergence of women's studies in an historical perspective. In the next section we will explore the transformative power of women's studies in a number of different fields including psychology, biology, history, economics, political science, anthropology, literary criticism, theology and communications. Foremost among our goals will be to understand how feminist scholars have provided a critique of the traditional disciplines and curriculum that has altered our basic assumptions in the academy about objectivity, knowledge and the process of learning. |