Vital Work Feminism and Women\'s

¶ … vital work feminism and Women's Studies calls for and performs?

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that feminism and Women's Studies performs real and vital 'work' in the world, and is not merely an abstract exercise in philosophy or literary analysis. Fighting for greater understanding of the role -- positive and negative -- that gender plays in our society and culture is the goal of feminism. It demands intense intellectual scrutiny and self-scrutiny. Without a formal political movement like feminism, or a formal academic discipline like Women's Studies, people will often be unwilling to perform such intense cognitive work. They are apt take gender assumptions and stereotypes for granted. We must not forget that part of the purpose of the feminist movement and the academic study of the construction of gender is to make people uncomfortable. Feminism must question cliches about gender, race, religion and the assumptions that people assume are natural, even though they may be socially constructed.

Given the strides women have made in recent decades, it has become tempting to assume that there is no real need for feminism in today's day and age. But feminism is still required intellectually, in a rigorous and systematic fashion, to examine how sexism exists, often in covert ways. Also, even if women are studied within the context of other academic disciplines like history and literature, gender is often treated as an incidental aspect of how the human character is conceived. Women's Studies brings gender as a category to the forefront of people's attention, although it has been helpful to many other academic disciplines not specifically devoted to the study of women.

Feminism also has a great deal of work to do, politically speaking. Less than a hundred years ago, many people were seriously questioning if women should receive higher education, and fifty years ago a woman might refused a promotion simply because it was assumed that a man was needed or was 'more appropriate' for the job because of his gender. The Women's Movement has tried to challenge such ideas. Changes in the law and societal thinking are partially due to the efforts of individual women, but there have always been strong women in history: only by uniting together in a movement have women and men been able to make a collective difference in creating a society with more equitable opportunities for all. The Women's Movement has also had a positive spill-over effect for all marginalized people -- when gender identities are questioned, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual assumptions are questioned as well.

Even now, there is an atmosphere of reactionary fear regarding the progress women have made. True, there are women U.S. Supreme Court justices and U.S. Senators but many people complain that women are beginning to outnumber men on a number of college campuses. Interestingly, while women's lack of prominence in fields such as art and medicine was seen as 'proof' of female inferiority, the lack of males on such college campuses today is seen as evidence that things have gone 'too far' and must be reined back in terms of the fight for women's rights.