Women's Studies: Women Studying or Studying Women?

Abstract

Mary Evans' article on women's studies (Evans, 1982) makes a spirited attempt to defend the practitioners of women's studies within academic institutions, principally those of the tertiary sector, from the accusations that they and their teaching is not feminist, since it is an altemative to political feminist practice, and therefore diminishes the latter, and/or that it is elitist and serves only to further the interests of its protagonists (teachers). Evans limits her discussion to her own personal situation a teacher of women's studies in a university. While that is as valid a context as any other to raise the issues, what seems to us unfortunate is that in her defence of academic women's studies courses it ignores the possibility that there is (intellectual) life outside the campus, in that her defence is restricted to the importance, difficulties and radicality of producing and teaching feminist theories in the fice of male-dominated ideology and definition of academic validity. This is a pity since the connexion between life in the world and on campus, an option available to exploration by feminist and other academics, would point up the two-way complementarity between academic work the production of feminist theory and the subjective experience of individual women. Indeed her plea to make the distinction between the analysis of the subordination of all women and the subjective and personal reaction to that subordination by one woman (Evans, 1982: 67) might, we feel, beneficially be replaced by a plea to make the connexions between the two. Even in the examples she chooses to illustrate the impact of feminist think-work on traditional academic disciplines, she fails to draw out the connexions between the academic analysis and the lived experience of the feminists who have been successful on this Eont. She cites sociology and literary criticism as the two disciplines which have been most influenced by feminist theorists. Yet surely it iS no accident that it should be these areas which have been most worked on since the feminist academics come to them with their individual experineces of living in a family as daughter, sister, wife, mother. What better to concentrate on than theoretical accounts of the family or literary portrayals of the thoughts and lives of women which individuals know from tbeir oum experience are based not on an understanding of the concrete reality of women's lives but on some idealized external and male-conjectured view of women and women's thoughts and feelings. In restricting her argument to the content and opposition to women's studies within the academic community, Evans ignores the other issues of organization and t