Academic Pathfinders: Knowledge Creation and Feminist Scholarship (review)

One of the most remarkable outcomes of the women's movement has been the development of feminist scholarship in higher education. In the three decades between 1970 and 2000, more than 600 programs were established at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, predominantly in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the natural sciences and the professions. Women's studies and interdisciplinary feminist journals served as publication outlets for the new feminist scholarship, proliferating at a rapid rate in every academic and professional field. A task force of the National Women's Studies Association provides a comprehensive list of these journals, indicating the range of publications available to feminist scholars: 11 women's studies journals, 15 interdisciplinary feminist journals, 29 international English-language feminist journals, and 87 disciplinary feminist journals in 31 fields ranging from Africana studies and business to law, social welfare and theater (Pryse, 1999, pp. 22-26).

Using knowledge creation as her framework, Gumport places women at the center of her inquiry in a case study of how feminist scholarship in three disciplines—history, philosophy, and sociology—evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of considerable cultural and political ferment in the United States. Her informants were a core group of 35 women faculty in 10 postsecondary research and comprehensive institutions within one metropolitan area of the United States who entered graduate school between 1956 and 1980. In this generational analysis, 20 of the informants were categorized as Pathfinders, having entering graduate school between 1964 and 1972; the remainder were either Forerunners (6) or Pathtakers (9).

The campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment and the extension of equal opportunity and affirmative action laws and regulations to higher education throughout this period did much to raise the consciousness of women students and faculty riding the crest of a wave of feminist and civil rights activism. The erosion of barriers to women's participation in male-dominated institutions throughout the 1970s fortified women's efforts to cross into unknown territory, engage in critiques of their disciplines, and introduce courses under the rubric of women's studies. Nevertheless, their stories convey the dilemmas they faced in overcoming resistance to their presence and to the questions they raised about their disciplines.

Gumport uses a chronological approach to provide insights on the major stages in the Pathfinders' intellectual biographies and career histories. She acknowledges her debt to Gail Sheehy, whose book The Pathfinders (1981) recorded the voices of men and women who "ford[ed] difficult passages or consider less-traveled paths" in their quest for self-fulfillment, which she attributed to their ability to reframe problems, find creative solutions, and rise above obstacles in their paths (p. 416).

In her first chapter, Gumport constructs a framework that builds on concepts of disciplinary and organizational paradigmatic change, exploring the two-directional paths through which these women "traversed the disciplinary and university contexts at the same time that their scholarly work in turn shaped the contexts where their contributions came to reside" (p. 27). Gumport applies her framework on knowledge creation in reviewing the history of academic feminism (Chapter 2), analyzing the convergence of political, organizational, and intellectual initiatives as the basis for women's studies programs. As she observes, intellectual departures from positivism were evident in the renewal of interest in ideology as critique and greater subjectivity in the construction of knowledge.

For another perspective on feminist theory construction and the influence of postmodernism, Marilyn Boxer's (1998) comprehensive and authoritative history of women's studies is worth reading. One of the earliest proponents of women's history—a pathfinder in her own right—Boxer recounts in depth the origins of women's studies in feminist advocacy and its transformation through scholarly inquiry "from a movement with relatively limited curricular goals but far-reaching aspirations for reconstructing academic institutions, to a...