Bonnie G. Smith - Womens Studies: The Basics

Womens Studies: The Basics is an accessible introduction to the pathbreaking and cross-disciplinary study of womenpast and present. Tracing the history of the field from its origins, this revised and updated text sets out the main topics making up the discipline, exploring its global development and its relevance to our own times. A new chapter on militarization and violence provides fresh insight into trends in the contemporary world and adds to curricular significance. Reflecting the diversity of the field, core themes include:

Womens Studies: The Basics provides an informed foundation for those new to the subject and is especially meant to guide undergraduates and postgraduates concentrating in womens studies and gender studies. Those in related disciplines will find in it a valuable overview of and background to women-centered issues and concerns, including global ones. The work also provides an updated list of suggested reading to help in further study, classroom presentations, and written exercises.

Bonnie G. Smith is the author, editor, or co-author of more than twenty books and many essays in womens and gender history, European and world history, and historiography. As Board of Governors Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, she has taught womens studies courses, including the comparative history of feminism.

The Basics is a highly successful series of accessible guidebooks which provide an overview of the fundamental principles of a subject area in a jargon-free and undaunting format.

Intended for students approaching a subject for the first time, the books both introduce the essentials of a subject and provide an ideal springboard for further study. With over 50 titles spanning subjects from artificial intelligence (AI) to womens studies, The Basics are an ideal starting point for students seeking to understand a subject area.

Each text comes with recommendations for further study and gradually introduces the complexities and nuances within a subject.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-Basics/book-series/B

THE BASICS

SECOND EDITION

BONIE G. SMITH

Second edition published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Bonnie G. Smith

The right of Bonnie G. Smith to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published by Routledge 2013

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Bonnie G., 1940- author.

Title: Womens studies : the basics / Bonnie G. Smith.

Description: 2 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Revised edition of the authors Womens studies, 2013.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018055156| ISBN 9781138495913 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138495937 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781351022989 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Womens studies.

Classification: LCC HQ1180 .S58 2019 | DDC 305.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055156

ISBN: 978-1-138-49591-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-49593-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-02298-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo and Bliss

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Womens Studies is arguably the most revolutionary new field of intellectual inquiry of our current age. In its early form Womens Studies brought all of womens experience under the scholarly microscope, subjecting it to the most advanced scientific methods available in the university. Researchers would dig up facts and develop insights about that experience and then teachers and students looked at the findings coming from an array of disciplines, processing and often perfecting them. Womens Studies programs include almost every perspectivefrom the natural sciences to the social sciences, from law to the arts. This breadth makes Womens Studies the most wide-ranging of academic fields. Its rich diversity provides the judgments, research, and energy of a broad group of scholars and students. They advance and constantly transform the discipline.

Womens Studies is a global undertaking. It began almost simultaneously around the world. Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea began its first Womens Studies program in 1977. In the United States, Cornell University and California State UniversitySan Diego began Womens Studies programs in 1969; more generally in the United States, Womens Studies went from several courses in individual universities across the country late in the 1960s to more than 600 degree granting majors and programs today. India established vigorous Womens Studies research early in the 1970s and became one of the most active countries in the world to investigate womens experience and thought. Even this phenomenal growth hardly captures the energy that continues to motivate those in Womens Studies.

The founding of Womens Studies was full of drama, as the enthusiasm of the first students and teachers met with disapproval from the male university establishment in the West. Some non-Western governments pushed for Womens Studies programs as part of their new-found independence from imperial control. The 1970s and 1980s saw women at the global grassroots challenging established dictators. At the time, celebrated Western intellectuals in socio-biology and anthropology were asserting womens biological and intellectual inferiority as scientific fact. They pointed, in contrast, to the risk-taking and intellectual originality of men. Womens Studies was a fad, other naysayers claimed, and one without the slightest intellectual merit. The field was simply gynecological politics, according to many. Yet, after several millennia of womens being seen as simply unworthy of consideration, Womens Studies inquiry emerged to take the innovative path that it still pursues today.