The Worm Turns?

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Rock-ribbed, old school military historians have long chafed at admonitions to incorporate into the field such novelties as gender. To them, a recent Times Higher Education article suggested -- tacitly -- that their days of chafing may be nearing an end.

In the past two decades, [women's studies] departments across Britain have been forced to integrate into other departments or to close outright. Only MAs and PhDs appear to be surviving the cull.

One problem has been the sustained attack on women's studies as a"soft" subject appealing to fringe elements and perpetuating old-fashioned, irrelevant debates. Women and society have moved on, say critics, but women's studies remains framed by the politics of a particular time, namely the feminist movement of the Seventies.

Far from coming up with new, invigorating ideas, women's studies professors tend to be"a little intellectually cohesive clique that has never recovered from the Seventies, when that rhetoric of oppression - women as subordinate class - was fashionable," [Christina] Hoff Summers said in an interview with The Dartmouth Review.

Hoff Summers argues that women's studies appeals to a person who is"hypersensitive and chronically offended" and who wants to view women as a"subordinate class" and men as"oppressors". As a result of this rhetoric, she suggests, students have come to associate feminism with women who are intellectually stilted and angry with men. Feminism has lost its force as a mainstream political movement.

Karen Lehrman, a US author of a book on post-ideological feminism, has also been a pointed critic of some approaches to women's studies. She attended classes at institutions in the US, including Dartmouth College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Smith College, and was disappointed at the" confessional" nature of a"therapeutic pedagogy" that valued students' feelings and experiences"as much as the texts themselves".

A possible survival strategy?

Students will still study women's issues - but only if they masquerade as something more trendy. Institutions such as the University of Warwick have resorted to repackaging women's studies under" cutting-edge" course names such as Technologies of the Gender Body (the latest model) or [ -- WAIT FOR IT! -- ] War and Conflict Studies.

(hat tip to Prof. Jonathan Winkler, Wright State University)