Bringing Women's Studies to Puget Sound

Women’s studies is an interdisciplinary field of research and study that emerged from and was influenced by the student, civil rights, New Left, peace, and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Described by Florence Howe, founder of the Feminist Press, in 1979 as the “academic arm of the women’s movement,” at its inception, women’s studies sought to bring  the social and political concerns of the era, such as employment and professional advancement, pay equity, questions of marriage and family, sexual politics, and more into university curriculums (citation below). By placing women’s lives, experiences, and contributions at the center of academic study, activists and scholars hoped to counter the lack of content focusing on women’s history and issues in higher education and challenge male-dominated fields of study and male-centric bodies of knowledge. Before formalized departments and programs, women’s studies courses were offered within existing disciplines, often taught by female faculty members, and advertised unofficially around college campuses.

The first women’s studies program in the United States was officially established at San Diego State University in the fall of 1970 and by the end of the decade the National Women’s Studies Association counted over 200 undergraduate programs offering a minor or a major. Early courses drew heavily from history, literature, and sociology, but then quickly expanded to other disciplines within the humanities, sociology, and eventually scientific and technical fields. 

This rapid growth did not proceed unchallenged as many programs faced concerns about  course content and the political nature of course materials, questions about the viability and structure of women’s studies as a discipline, opposition from colleagues and administrators, in addition to more tangible difficulties due to limited budgets and staffing. Internal debates about the nature and purpose of women’s studies and critiques from lesbians, Black feminists, and women of color that challenged the heteronormative, white, and middle-class conceptual frameworks typical of early scholarship continued to transform women’s studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As programs and departments grew, women’s studies curricula evolved to reflect emerging scholarship, new theories and methodologies, and transnational and global perspectives. Since the 1990s, established women’s studies programs have been expanded, and sometimes renamed, to incorporate and reflect related fields of gender studies, sexuality studies, masculinity studies, and LGBT studies. Current programs in women’s and gender studies continue to employ interdisciplinary methods to examine social and cultural constructs of gender, systems of power, privilege, and oppression, and the ways that gender intersects with race, class, ability, age, sexual orientation and other social identities. 

The University of Puget Sound offered its first course in Women’s Studies “Women in American Society” in the spring of 1972. Like many early programs, the Women’s Studies program at Puget Sound faced a variety of challenges, specifically with regard to its budget, adequate staffing, and administrative support. Student interest and the efforts of a small group of dedicated faculty and staff, often splitting their time between appointments in other academic departments on campus, sustained a handful of initial courses that were offered inconsistently in the early years of the program. By 1975, Women’s Studies had established a minor requiring a minimum of five courses, which were cross-listed and fulfilled major requirements in other departments. Despite persistent challenges in fiscal and human resources, the program continued to expand course offerings throughout the 1980s and 1990s though it remained a minor with no full-time, tenure line faculty positions. In 2005, the Women’s Studies program officially changed its name to Gender Studies to better reflect the growth of the field, followed by another name change to Gender & Queer Studies in 2014. A student-driven petition and proposal sent to the university’s curriculum committee helped to establish a new major in Gender & Queer Studies in the fall of 2020. The Gender & Queer Studies program currently offers students the opportunity to study issues pertaining to sexuality, identity, and gender through an interdisciplinary curriculum taught by faculty in academic departments across the university.

This digital teaching collection uses yearbooks, course bulletins, issues of the student newspaper, administrative documents, and more, ranging in date between 1969-1990, to explore the early years of the Women’s Studies program at the University of Puget Sound. Using these documents, learners will encounter a variety of perspectives from students, faculty, staff, and administrators at key moments when Women’s Studies was establishing its legitimacy as an academic discipline and as an area of social and political struggle. These documents are best read and discussed in chronological order.

Howe, Florence. "Introduction: The First Decade of Women's Studies." Harvard Educational Review 49, no. 4, November 1979, pp. 413–421.