Women’s Studies programs began as a way to bring women’s perspective back into the academic fields that often passed them over. As women’s contributions to these fields have been more recognized, women’s studies programs have had to redefine and expand themselves.

Women’s studies programs at most universities now emphasize sexuality, gender identity, race and masculinity more than ever before.

Following these recent changes in the field, Marquette University’s interdisciplinary Women’s Studies program, started in 1986 with only a minor, became a Women’s and Gender Studies program this fall.

Masculinity, sexuality and gender were already addressed in the former program, but now those topics are formally recognized as part of the program, said Amelia Zurcher, director of Marquette’s WGST program.

Defining personal identity is never easy, especially when it determines how one is perceived by the university administration and student body.

‘Men have gender, too’

When more women are enrolled in college than men (the class of 2014 is 52 percent female and 48 percent male), some women today believe gender inequality has disappeared.

Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, said society is far from achieving full equality. For women in the United States, there’s still an income disparity and violence against women, she said.

In 2008 women made 77 cents for every dollar men earned, according to an October 26, 2009, Time magazine report.

Even if full equality did exist, Kimmich said gender studies would still be important.

Women’s studies and gender studies programs teach male and female students how to lead richer lives by examining the roles they’ve been taught and the opportunities and constraints each sex faces, she said.

The thinking done by students in these programs can lead to a more socially just world for everyone, Kimmich said.

“Women’s and Gender Studies is about our whole culture and how gender structures it,” Zurcher said.

Gender is a basic category of identity that shapes how people think about work, play, marriage, family and even sports, she said.

Desiree Valentine, a senior in the College of Communication and WGST major, said she likes the emphasis on gender because it’s something people deal with daily but don’t have the tools to understand.

There’s a relation between all genders, said Valentine, the student representative on the WGST advisory board.

For Zurcher, gender is now used as a lens to look at society instead of trying to make up for the lack of scholarship on women in other disciplines, she said.

“It’s not reintegrating women in various means of inquiry but looking at how gender operates and functions as an organizational category,” she said.

“Gender has profound effects on men, too,” Zurcher said.

Ed de St. Aubin, Marquette psychology professor and WGST advisory board member, said gender is ubiquitous so people rarely stop to reflect on it.

“It’s like asking fish to talk about water,” he said.

Marquette’s WGST program

The newly revamped program broadens its scope and what can be taught, said Nancy Snow, Marquette philosophy professor and WGST advisory board member.

Snow said the program changed to make it more appealing to students, more similar to programs at other institutions and because the focus of the field had changed.

A lot of men wouldn’t be interested in just a women’s studies program, Snow said. The ad hoc committee members in charge of the redesign hoped this would help more men become interested, she said.

But de St. Aubin added, “It’s a good intellectual move, not a marketing move.”

De St. Aubin said the women’s studies faculty realized including gender in the program name was a more contemporary way of looking at things.

The restructuring process began with the resignation of women’s studies coordinator Diane Hoeveler in 2007.

Once it was clear that many faculty members wanted changes made to the program, an ad hoc committee was formed to revise the mission, objective for majors, structure and course offerings, said Snow, committee chair.

The one-semester-old program is already seeing interest.

Zurcher said there are three declared majors and five minors. In the previous women’s studies program, there were roughly one major and twelve minors each year during the 13 years Hoeveler was the coordinator of the program.

A long way since 1970

The women’s studies field has changed a lot since the first program began at San Diego State University in 1970.

The first women’s studies programs were influenced by the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, said Kathy Miller-Dillon, assistant director for the Center of Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Women faculty, who were educated during the women’s movement, decided to focus on women’s issues, she said.

Beginning in the 1990s, Third Wave Feminism brought an emphasis to race, globalization, masculinity, gender and sexuality, said Pam Wojcik, director of the Gender Studies program at the University of Notre Dame. This brought changes to the women’s studies and gender studies fields as well, she said.

Feminists realized there wasn’t one experience that fit all women.

“It’s not as much focused on white women in America or England,” Wojcik said.

Penny Weiss, director of Women’s Studies at Saint Louis University, said both feminism and the women’s studies fields have “grown up a lot,” but women’s studies couldn’t have been done without talking about these broader issues.

What’s in a name?

Although there have been many changes in universities’ women’s studies programs, the vast majority of the National Women’s Studies Association members’ programs are still called women’s studies, Kimmich said.

Kimmich said the trend toward renaming has to do with what’s best for individual campuses and campus politics. For some campuses, a name change might make sense because program leaders want to make the program more attractive or they think it’s a better reflection of their program, she said.

The name change is partly a marketing issue, said Wojcik.

“If you call it women’s studies, you’re going to get women majors,” she said. If you open it up to gender studies, you open up the possibility of men joining, Wojcik said.

The stigma commonly tied to feminism says female feminists are “man-haters” and male feminists are less masculine because of it. Sources agree that the same stigma also applies to women’s studies and gender studies programs.

Weiss said women are afraid to be women’s studies majors because they think men will disapprove. This just shows who’s in charge, she said.

Weiss, who gave a presentation for the NWSA two weeks ago, said her research found there are many reasons for changing a women’s studies program’s name, including the evolution of the women’s studies field and a desire to get more men involved.

There have been no studies on the effectiveness of a name change in preventing the alienation of men and ending a program’s stigma, Weiss said. She added that changing the name isn’t necessary if the program does what it is supposed to.