Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 1981
Abstract
The Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities, in issuing its thirty-one recommendations, noted: "We see our report primarily as a contribution to rethinking the humanities, not as a shopping list." In defining the humanities, among other things, as a "turn of mind" toward history, "the record of what has moved men and women before us to act, believe, and build as they did," the Commission recommends that colleges develop "new materials for teaching the humanities" as a "further means for invigorating [them]." That women's studies may be a legitimate energizer of the sagging humanities seems a likely possibility when one realizes that this year at least 20,000 women's studies courses will be taught in American colleges and universities and that more than 350 institutions have already inaugurated formal programs, with over forty awarding graduate degrees. Thus, the putative "male-centered curriculum," which for 345 years has been less than benign to women's concerns, seems to have begun to accommodate this new area of knowledge.