History of Gender & Women's Studies at Connecticut College
The work of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies is uniquely related to the founding mission of Connecticut College, which was established in 1911 because Wesleyan University had recently expelled its women students. A group of the state's citizens committed themselves to providing an institution for the education of women. The Department of Gender and Women's Studies builds on and incarnates that proud founding history, the centennial of which the College will celebrate in 2011.
Women's Studies at Connecticut College reflects the emergence of a new discipline from the work within and across established disciplines by the new generation of women scholars who began to enter the academy in the 1960s. Women's Studies began as an academic field of inquiry in the United States in 1969 with the founding of the first program at the San Diego State University, with a second program in 1970-71 at Cornell. At Connecticut College in 1970, Helen Mulvey taught the first women's studies course titled "Women in Late Victorian England," during the first year of the College's co-educational status. Eight years later, the first introductory course was offered here, coordinated by Alix Deguise, who drew speakers from over fifteen disciplines to engage different issues relating to the burgeoning scholarship on women.
By 1975 there were 150 programs nationally, and by 1985, 450; by the early 1990s there were over 600 programs in the United States. At Connecticut College, the Women's Studies program became the Gender and Women's Studies Program in 1994, a move that acknowledged important developments in gender theory, including a more nuanced understanding of sexuality and the interrelatedness of constructions of masculinities and femininities. By the end of the century, women's studies had interrogated all of the major fields of knowledge, providing insightful and nuanced understandings of the historical evolution of gender and its constitutive role in organizing social processes of different kinds.
At Connecticut College, graduate students and part-time faculty through the 1970s and 1980s routinely taught introductory women's studies courses.
In the early 1990s, the steering committee of the by-then Gender and Women's Studies program at Connecticut College had engaged in a process of "internationalization" of its curriculum. People Organized for Women's Rights, an initiative of the Women's Center, advocated for a full-time faculty position. By 1996, the breadth and depth of the program was measured by the fact that GWS had 33 associated faculty teaching 37 courses cross-listed in 17 departments. The Fourth UN Conference on Women in 1995 culminated twenty years of UN-encouraged and bottom-up global women's organizing, an impact registered locally by the Women's Studies Committee in its annual report: "As last year's U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing sharply revealed, the future of Gender and Women's Studies programs requires the development of global perspectives."
As a consequence of these deliberations, the steering committee decided to anchor the approach to gender and women's studies at Connecticut College in transnational feminist analysis and hired Jacqui Alexander in 1998 as the Fuller-Maathai Professor and founding Chair. Alexander was "one of the fewer than half dozen people defining the new field of transnational gender and women's studies," as the Committee explained to the faculty. "At Connecticut College we have an advantage in building a department and developing a major at this moment, when our understanding of these theoretical and practical issues is more developed than it could have been ten years ago."
Jacqui Alexander explained in subsequent departmental staffing plans the conceptual shift in the move to transnational feminism: "The important distinction between the use of the transnational as an analytic category and the use of the West as the central comparative reference is that in the case of the latter different regions of the world are made to function as appendages to an already existing set of social relations which presumably assume a greater degree of universality. This different way of thinking about the global emerged as the 'transnational.' "
Cynthia Fuller-Davis '67 underwrote the new vision for the program with a generous gift that endowed the Fuller-Maathai Chair in Gender and Women's Studies, provided money for programming, and left an endowment that would partially fund a second position.
In 1999, the GWS Steering Committee requested: "G&WS is asking the faculty to approve departmental status for G&WS so that G&WS can have all the institutional rights and responsibilities that departments at this college have." The new departmental status also once again reflected national trends through which the emerging field of gender and women's studies was becoming an academic discipline. As Marilyn Boxer observed in When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America (1998):
"Women's Studies required a separate location as a department, where practitioners could control their own curriculum, schedule their own classes, and hire their own faculty, who would be evaluated specifically for their teaching and research on women. Eventually, with the development of the PhD degree in women's studies, graduates trained in several traditional disciplines would be prepared to bring true interdisciplinarity to the new field."
With the resignation of Professor Jacqui Alexander in 2002, Mab Segrest, who had served on an interim basis for two years, was then hired as the Fuller-Maathai Chair and Chair of the Department. Dean of the Faculty Frances Hoffmann holds a joint appointment in Sociology and GWS, and Roxana Walker-Canton served as Visiting Assistant Professor from 2006-2008. Cybele Locke will serve as Visiting Assistant Professor for 2008-10.
As GWS moves to hire a second full-time position in 2008-2009, the advancement of the department continues to reflect the emergence of gender and women's studies as a major intellectual and political development in the new millennium.
Last Modified: Thursday, May 22, 2008 9:19