Not to seem redundant, but I wanted to provide links to a few interesting articles regarding the future of women’s studies programs, since it seems that David Horowitz sparked some interesting dialogue on the subject with his recent article, “No Ideologue Left Behind“. In it, Horowitz claims that women’s studies programs grew out of the women’s liberation movement, and that their purpose is more politically oriented than intellectually relevant:
“Women’s Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression. This is the statement of a political cause not a program of scholarly inquiry.” (source)
While Horowitz prefers to oversimplfy the women’s studies programs for the sake of his own argument, what he fails to recognize is that while these programs may have found their opportunity for formation in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s, women’s studies programs today are not merely political training ground for feminist activists without scholarly intention or intellectual relevance. The very notion that women’s studies programs are interdisciplinary programs suggest the scholarly relevance of significant proportions that Horowitz chooses to ignore. The premise of women’s studies programs is not to train political activists, but to challenge the modern assumption of the one-dimensional, ahistorical white man’s version of history, sociology, psychology, theory and philosophy, among many other different disciplines. To recognize that these disciplines are contextual, that perspectives across all subject matter are gendered, historical, and socially affected and constructed – to ME, this is the very height of scholarly inquiry – and women’s studies provides the tools with which to participate in such inquiry.
