What Have We Won, What Have We Lost?

Abstract

In the minds of many feminists it is still an open question whether women's studies in the academy is a contradiction in terms.1 For many reasons, one of which is that education is big business, the educational establishment is one of the most conservative of all social institutions in America. Large campuses like ours in the California state university and college system tend to be administered like businesses, accountable to superiors and the taxpaying public for a product turned out with maximum efficiency and minimum cost. The values of the managers-hierarchy, competition, clear vertical chains of command-are quite antithetical to the ideas and practices valued by the second wave of American feminism. Furthermore, many people who teach on university campuses subscribe to the most conservative justification for higher education: that their function is the transmission of static bodies of knowledge to maturing generations. When we moved out of the women's movement and onto university campuses more than a decade ago, we were right to be skeptical about our ability to change the institution of higher education and right to be worried about the institution's ability to coopt us. Bitter as the struggle has been, I think that a number of central issues still have not been resolved. That we have brought significant change to the campus is true, but we have not been permitted to do it our way. We have not sold out, but we have not won, either. In the eighties, our situation has been made even more difficult by the political climate and the difficulty that the women's movement is having retaining its commitment to sexual politics.2 The experience of the Long Beach Women's Studies Program may be idiosyncratic in important ways, but it also raises a number of interesting general questions about the institutionalization of women's studies. As Sherna Gluck and Sondra Hale make clear, from the beginning the university objected to our attachment to collectivity in the governance of the program and in our teaching styles. But administrators and faculty were also extremely antagonistic to the content of women's studies courses, an issue that has received surprisingly little attention and one that I think may be central to our continued development as a new discipline in the academy. Administrators and faculty did not initially seem to consider women's studies subversive, perhaps because they failed to take seriously the intellectual enterprise in which we were engaged. Few of them in the early seventies saw women's studies as anything more than a marginally defensible intellectual exercise. They thought we were disruptive, and consciousness raising quickly became their euphemism for inherent anti-intellectual tendencies in women's studies. As we developed the women's studies curriculum, we found our academic credentials constantly at issue. We learned to develop a bemused tolerance for colleagues on committees who were capable of uncovering evidence of functional illiteracy in simple typographical errors; we smiled through the speeches of colleagues who, in the intellectual vacuum presented by women's studies, were only too happy to offer expert advice. But if we thought that what our colleagues wanted to s e was the development of women's studies, we were wrong. Our most rudimentary efforts to add compensatory information for and about women to university curricula were often met with disdain and open antagonism. Only later, as women's studies grew, was this Hale/Sievers 43