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

Classism in the university setting: Examining student antecedents and outcomes.

“…Another institutional intervention might take the form of creating social class studies departments, or hiring faculty across the curriculum who conduct social class research. Changes such as these would help students develop a more critical understanding of social class, much like women's studies and ethnic studies facilitated student critical consciousness in the 1970s and continue to do so today (Borrego, 2008;Hu-DeHart, 1995;Jacoby Boxer, 1998). Women's studies and ethnic studies generally began when a critical mass of women and students of color entered the academy and advocated for majors and programs that reflected their lived experiences and interests (Jacoby Boxer, 1998;Rogers, 2006).…”

“…Changes such as these would help students develop a more critical understanding of social class, much like women's studies and ethnic studies facilitated student critical consciousness in the 1970s and continue to do so today (Borrego, 2008;Hu-DeHart, 1995;Jacoby Boxer, 1998). Women's studies and ethnic studies generally began when a critical mass of women and students of color entered the academy and advocated for majors and programs that reflected their lived experiences and interests (Jacoby Boxer, 1998;Rogers, 2006). These programs, in turn, have changed pedagogical and institutional practices to be more inclusive (Borrego, 2008).…”

A milestone in the pursuit of gender equality: Predicting first women presidents in U.S. higher education institutions, 1980–2018

“…Instead, structures specific to gender and feminist knowledge seem to matter more. The establishment of women's studies was a critical and hard‐fought innovation in higher education that signified the valorizing of women's knowledge, research methods, and topics of study (Boxer, 2001). Since being offered in the late 1960s by only a handful of HEIs, most HEIs in the U.S. now offer at least a women's studies course, if not an undergraduate major or minor.…”

“…Prior empirical work has found that women continue to face epistemic exclusion and scholarly devaluation in the academy, with consequences for promotion and tenure decisions (Settles et al., 2022). Women and gender studies programs legitimize and preserve feminist knowledge (Boxer, 2001). When institutionalized as departments, they provide new faculty lines through which more women may enter the institution (Scully, 1996).…”

We Did It Our Way: Motivations, Satisfactions, and Accomplishments of Senior Academic Women

“…In approximately 20 years, from 1976 to 1997, women as a percentage of full-time employees increased from 25% to 36% of faculty positions and from 26% to 45% of executive-administrative-managerial positions (NCES, 1998(NCES, , 2001; and the gradual increase in representation of women continues, reaching 42% of full-time faculty and 53% of full-time executive-administrative-managerial positions by 2007 (NCES, 2010). On another level, the change in representation of women and in attendant attitudes can be viewed in terms of the underlying causes, powerful influences that began in the early 1970s-most notably, the application of affirmative action to higher education (Astin & Snyder, 1982), the creation of commissions on women (Glazer-Raymo, 1999, 2008a, and, perhaps more subtly, the development of women's studies and feminist perspectives in many disciplines (Boxer, 1998). Finally, on the most personal and complex level, women whose academic careers began in the 1970s were both affected by the transformations and responsible for many of them.…”