You might not think twice when skimming your course catalog and seeing classes within the women’s and gender studies department, but just a few decades ago, such programs were few and far between. The field of study first emerged in the 1970s, born out of the civil rights, student, and women’s movements in the U.S. It wasn’t until the 80s and 90s, though, that it became a mainstream program at institutions — and even since then, it has changed and evolved significantly.
In its earliest stages, women’s studies focused on challenging social norms and platforming women’s voices. The first accredited women’s studies course was created at Cornell University in 1969, and the first women’s studies program originated at San Diego State College (now San Diego State University) the year after. Gender studies came a few years later, born out of the original women’s studies field to address broader questions of gender identity and relations. Today, the field of women’s and gender studies has taken a more intersectional approach by also incorporating topics like sexuality, race, and class.
While students around the U.S. credit women’s and gender studies programs for expanding their perspectives and inspiring careers in advocacy, the field has become a recent target of right-wing state governments and President Donald Trump’s administration. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill from the Florida Senate that sought to restrict funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at state universities, making it much harder for those schools’ research and programs to stay afloat. Since taking office in January, Trump has threatened to strip federal funding from colleges and universities promoting DEI policies, leaving many universities unsure of how to move forward when it comes to courses that revolve around gender and sexuality.
And yet, women’s and gender studies programs continue to thrive, in large part due to their dedicated faculty and professors. For Women’s History Month, Her Campus spoke to five professors of women’s and gender studies on what motivated them to enter the field.
Some of these professors began their careers in other fields of study, but were inspired by various experiences to examine their areas of study through a gendered or women’s lens. Falguni Sheth, for example, is a professor and chair of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University in Georgia. “My Phd is in Philosophy,” she tells Her Campus. “However, I moved to working in WGSS in order to think about issues pertaining to different kinds of marginalized, vulnerable, and dehumanized groups, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.” Her areas of teaching include critical philosophy of race and race studies, feminist political theory, and political and legal philosophy. Her latest book, titled Unruly Women: Race, Neoliberalism, and the Hijab discusses how the judicial system impacts Black Muslim and Muslim women of color in the United States.
Holly Cashman, a professor of Spanish and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, was a sociolinguist before entering the WGS field. “I became more and more fascinated by how the categories we used were inadequate for capturing the complexities of people’s lived experiences with various aspects of their identity, including gender and sexuality,” she says, noting a lack of research that incorporated both multilingual and LGBTQ+ groups. After taking over one of her retired colleague’s introduction to LGBTQ+ studies course, Cashman says her engagement in the field deepened. “I am inspired by the need to preserve our queer stories, to understand how we understand and express our identities, and to maintain support for doing this work, both within the academic context and in collaboration with our communities outside academia.”
Other professors started their careers knowing WGS was the field they wanted to pursue their research and teach in. Jillian Hernandez, an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Florida, says she wanted to enter the field because “gender roles make my life and those of the women around me painful and difficult.” Hernandez’s areas of study include art history, performance, gender, ethnic, Latinx, and Black studies, much of which she was inspired to pursue through her experiences as a community arts educator in Miami. Her book Aesthetics of Excess explores how aesthetics like big hair or jewelry (that are associated with working-class Black and and Latina girls and women) are perceived to suggest sexual deviance.
Gayatri Gopinath, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at New York University, credits the WGS field for being the launchpad to her research. “I entered the field of Women’s and Gender Studies because it was the only field that allowed me to do exactly the kind of research that I wanted to do,” she says. “My work is interdisciplinary, transnational, and focused on different forms of queer, feminist expressive culture, so it was not easy to find a disciplinary ‘home,’ especially when I was starting my career. Women’s and gender studies provided me with that intellectual and institutional home base.”
Karma Chavez, a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Texas at Austin, says her own experiences learning about women of color feminisms in graduate school inspired her to continue to share her knowledge. “I wanted to be able to do the kind of work that they did and use my scholarship to make the world a better place,” Chavez says.
While the field of women’s and gender studies is facing serious threats from the powers that be, professors like these are standing strong in their commitment to their students and the communities they serve. “What motivates me to keep doing this work even through these incredibly difficult times is the determination to not leave the community — inside and out of academia — worse off than I found it when I first came out as an undergraduate in the early 1990s,” Cashman says.