MARCH 19, 2009 ISSUE
Now It’s Time To Have Women’s Studies
Editor’s Note: The following article is part of a series of articles featuring women and women’s issues in conjunction with Women’s History Month, observed during the month of March.
Dr. Margaret McFadden is the founder of the first Women’s Studies program in the UNC system.
When the refurbished American History Museum opened in Washington, D.C. last fall, Dr. Margaret McFadden went to look. She asked a volunteer what the main women’s history exhibits were.
“We don’t have women’s history,” the volunteer replied. In fact, the volunteer had never heard of women’s history.
Narrowing her query down to something possibly more fruitful, McFadden asked if there was any display on women during World War II. Again the answer was a bemused no.
“Excuse me?” said McFadden, retelling this incident recently. “There’s nothing on women’s history in the refurbished American History Museum?”
The story takes McFadden—the founder of the first Women’s Studies program in the UNC system—back to the late 1970s, when she was introducing Women’s Studies to ASU.
“I remember the first college meeting to get approval for a minor and somebody said, ‘When are we going to have men’s studies?’” said McFadden. “I answered, ‘Well, we’ve had men’s studies all our lives. Sir. So now it’s time to have women’s studies.’”
Women’s Studies was, and still is, a revolutionary idea.
“The education that most people get in most disciplines is totally about men,” said McFadden, “and so you can take any social science and humanities discipline and see that most of the studies didn’t pay much attention to gender, or that there might be differences between women and men in whatever—adolescent behavior, physical attributes, maybe the way people looked at particular issues.”
McFadden said this can also be said of the hard sciences, though in a different way.
The first Women’s Studies courses ever began around 1970 in New York and California, and McFadden taught a course on images of women in literature in Germany. When hired in 1975, Women’s Studies didn’t exist at ASU.
“There were a handful of people in the faculty who were interested in, or teaching a kind of Women’s Studies course in their department already. So we all just got together and since I was in inter-disciplinary studies and had a very open teaching kind of arrangement, you could say I started it, but you could say this group started it, it was more a faculty, grass-roots effort,” remembered McFadden.
At ASU, there was a minor first and then a major.
“Now we have a graduate minor, a 12-hour certificate in Women’s Studies. You can do 12 graduate hours on your own, or in addition to graduate studies. It’s very popular in English, Appalachian Studies, Sociology, History, Anthropology and several of the education degrees,” McFadden said.
McFadden’s anecdotes, thirty years apart, about the American History Museum and ASU give the impression that, in spite of all the work in Women’s Studies, there is little change, but the situation is not quite all bad.
“I think there’s more inclusion [now] of gender questions and materials having to do with women,” said McFadden.
“But,” she added, “lots of students will not know about Women’s Studies and they won’t take the courses. Then if they do, they ask why they didn’t know about it.”
The obstacles faced thirty years ago “are still out there,” she said. “You have lots of people asking why we need Women’s Studies.”
McFadden said the discipline helps in many fields.
“[Women’s Studies] fits really nicely with the helping professions,” McFadden said, citing the case of a future hospital administrator, whose Women’s Studies courses “make wonderful sense because most of her employees are going to be female. For her to know something about some of the issues of women in the workforce fits very nicely.”
McFadden said that Women’s Studies also “works nicely with a business degrees” and, of course, teaching.
“It makes sense for people in education to have…gender studies. Half of all the students everywhere, in all disciplines, in most places in the world are female because half the population is female,” she said.
Women’s History Month
For several years before March became Women’s History Month in the United States in 1987, there was a Women’s History Week. It started in California when a group of educators began to focus on women’s history around International Women’s Day, which has occurred on March 8 since 1911.
It’s important for Americans to [begin to] pay attention to International Women’s Day,” said Dr. Margaret McFadden, pioneer of Women’s Studies at ASU.
“Women’s Studies needs to have a global focus as well as just looking at what’s happening in this country…I am always trying to get at least beginning students to take off those American blinders.”
Women’s History Month in the United States may have begun by latching on to International Women’s Day, but now several other countries devote the whole of March to celebrate their own women’s history too.
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