Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 1978
Abstract
It may seem somewhat confusing to be reading an article in 1978 on the new Women's Studies Program at Barnard College. After all, people say, haven't you had women's studies there for years? The answer is, well, yes and no. Of course there have been women's studies courses at Barnard for many years. Annette Baxter's History of American Women was one of the earliest courses in the country, first taught in the fall of 1966. Similarly, Catharine R. Stimpson introduced a course on Images of Women in Literature in the spring of 1971. The Barnard Women's Center was begun in 1971, and the annual "The Scholar and the Feminist" conference that it sponsors was first held in 1974. But it was only in May 1977 that the Barnard College faculty voted to establish a major in women's studies, for students who wish to explore tbe basic questions raised by the new scholarship on women. Some of the issues touched upon in this field are: sex roles, sex differences, and the concepts of femininity and masculinity; the roles of women in culture and society, past and present, and their implications for the roles of men; questions about the distribution of power, work and resources in the public and private domains; and the symbolic and religious place of feminine and masculine imagery.