Women’s Studies Students – the New College Girls

In her book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now, Lynn Peril notes that “as part of the protest movement, students held teach-ins and ‘free university’ classes on racism and black history in addition to those on the pacifism and conscientious objection, and at the Free University of Seattle in 1966, a course on women’s history. From these roots grew the demand for including in the traditional curriculum such interdisciplinary courses as, first, black studies…and, finally, women’s studies” (Peril 222). The rise of women’s studies courses and departments were met with serious opposition, and, unfortunately, continue to face serious criticisms, both from college culture and academia.

Much like the College Girls of yesteryear, as a women’s studies major I have been told to hide the nature of my education from men. Much like advice book author Frances Strain’s observation that “it takes discipline to hide a Phi Beta Kappa key and wear instead a piece of swank costume jewelry…but it pays if a girl is matrimony bound” (qtd. Peril 213-214), friends have advised me to answer only with my first major, government, to that ubiquitous pick-up line, “what’s your major?” In a strange, circular, irony, the social need for women to hide their education has landed squarely on the shoulders of women’s studies majors, yet, thankfully, we are too confident in our feminist identities to hide them. I always respond with “government and women’s studies,” and if the frat boy in question makes a quick exit, then I’ve saved myself time – he wasn’t worth it anyway.

Women’s studies faces harsh critiques from within the academy as well. Peril notes that “even today, women’s studies is attacked by academics for its ‘unfocused’ interdisciplinary nature, and mocked by antifeminists for the touch-feely nature of ‘consciousness raising’ and for what they consider its fractious identity politics” (Peril 223). I am consistently surprised when people who I generally consider to be well-educated and open-minded ask if I have a major other than women’s studies, and when I inform them that I am also a government major, respond with “oh, thank God you have a real major, too.” As if women’s studies isn’t a “real” course of study. Feminists’ work is never done, yet even women’s studies professors have advised me and other students to take a second, more mainstream major and even to go to grad school in that field to prepare for inevitable continuing budget cuts in women’s studies departments and fields. It is unfortunate, but today’s women’s studies major truly faces the same binds as the college girls in the early 20^th century – we are expected to really be preparing for something other than what we are earning a degree in and to hide that degree from eligible bachelors. How far we haven’t come!

-Cate Domino