Women's Studies in the "Post-Feminist" University

Although there is a sizeable body of evidence to suggest that women's social and economic status in the United States has been steadily eroded in recent years, pundits celebrating the dawn of the age of "post-feminism" abound. The article examines three of the most popular arguments launched against women's studies programs in the wake of some recent and, hopefully, precipitous announcements of the decline of such programs in the United States and Great Britain. Women's studies rejects the idea that knowledge can be reduced to a set of individual outcomes, in favor of a vision of knowledge production that is holistic, historically situated, particularist, and pragmatic—working through collective and conversation and debate across disciplines and between the university and its wider public. As such, women's studies, far from ancillary, is central to the mission of the university. The challenge now facing feminists dwelling in the ruins of the "post-feminist" university is how to begin to generate approaches to the study of women that insist upon the distinctly "feminine" and "qualitative" dimensions of human experience across the disciplines—approaches that do not simply counter women's exclusion from dominant regimes of knowledge, but that actively work to create new standards of intellectual value.