History

History, Growth and Development of the
Women’s and Gender Studies Program

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at DePaul University is a well-established inter- and multi-disciplinary academic program. The undergraduate minor has been offered since January, 1985 and the undergraduate major has been available to students since September, 1992. A substantive revision of the undergraduate curriculum was approved in the Spring of 2002; at that time the Program added "and Gender Studies" to its title, reflecting contemporary trends in research, scholarship and pedagogy in the field. The program has also offered, up to the present, a graduate level concentration through the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies Program and a four-course, non-degree graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Both the major and minor are interdisciplinary in nature and grounded in a combination of core and elective courses ordinarily offered by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and elective courses ordinarily offered through other departments and programs. The courses offered through other departments and programs for credit toward the major, minor or Graduate Certificate programs are approved by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program Curriculum Committee.

Over the past decade, the number of faculty involved with Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul has increased dramatically. One indication of this growth is the phenomenal increase in full-time faculty with appointments in Women’s and Gender Studies. At its inception, and for a decade subsequent, no faculty had full-time positions within the program. Until 1995, members of the Advisory Committee staffed all courses in the major, while a Director was elected from the Advisory for three-year terms. Since 1995, a significant shift has taken place in the program’s composition. The program now has nine full-time faculty members and two adjunct faculty members in the program. There are six tenured faculty (Beth Catlett, Laila Fara, Sandra Jackson, Beth Kelly, Susan Leigh and Ann Russo), two tenure-track faculty (Natalie Bennett and Melissa Bradshaw), one Visiting Assistant Professor (Kate Kane), and an adjunct faculty member who regularly participates in the program (Barbara Schaffer). Membership on the program’s committee has grown from a dozen participating faculty in the 1980s to fifty-three members from various departments, programs and schools at DePaul. Many of the faculty serving on the Committee initiate and develop courses in their own departments and programs that are cross-listed or carry Women’s and Gender Studies credit toward the major, minor or graduate certificate.

The breadth and depth of course offerings in Women’s and Gender Studies has increased substantially, in line with the growth in program faculty and faculty whose scholarship and teaching focuses on issues relevant to Women’s and Gender Studies. Currently, over seventy courses with Women’s and Gender Studies credit are offered by faculty from departments and programs outside of the program. The significant interest in Women’s and Gender Studies in other departments is best exemplified by the Religious Studies Department that has a strong group of faculty connected with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program who initiated and developed a concentration of courses in Women and Religion.

The growth of the program is also evident in the increased numbers of undergraduate students who are choosing Women’s and Gender Studies as a major or minor, or graduate students choosing to pursue the Graduate Certificate or MALS Concentration in Women’s and Gender Studies. At the undergraduate level, we have increased from approximately ten declared majors in 1992 to over seventy declared majors in 2004. Since 1996, first-year students increasingly indicate an interest in majoring or minoring in Women’s and Gender Studies when applying to DePaul—from one individual in 1996 to over a dozen in 2001. Many of the students are double majors. The fields of study include Sociology, Psychology, Communication, Political Science, Philosophy, American Studies, Geography, Spanish, and English. Being able to combine Women’s and Gender Studies with a traditional discipline affords students a broader range of options when they graduate, in terms of preparation for graduate school and job searches.

The relationship between research and social activism has always been integral to the interdisciplinary field of Women’s and Gender Studies. The Women and Gender Research Initiative was founded in 2002 to promote community-based programs and research that inform the prevention of and intervention in gender-related oppressions. The initiative works with community members to effect social change through social policy, advocacy and community development. The initiative also is committed to documenting, collecting, and making public the contributions of individuals whose lives reflect previously untold experiences and resilience. Over the last two years, the Women and Gender Research Initiative has benefited from the support of the Steans Center for Community-Based Service learning, and has developed, funded, and implemented several very successful community-based projects. Projects include the Oral History Project of the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the Take Back the Halls: Teen Violence Prevention Project that conducts violence prevention workshops in Chicago Public Schools.

As the interdisciplinary field of Women’s and Gender Studies has become institutionalized across a broad spectrum of institutions in the U.S. and abroad, a strong set of inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarship and concomitant graduate training has emerged over the past three decades. Concomitant-yet incremental-shifts have taken place in the scope and content of Women’s and Gender Studies curricula, with DePaul developing in line with national trends towards incorporating global issues and transnational perspectives into our curriculum, examining the interconnectedness of systems and structures of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality/ethnicity, and disability, etc., and adding "Gender Studies" to what was originally solely "Women’s Studies".

The newly transnational focus of the program, for instance, emphasizes how the world today is characterized by complex sets of interconnections that do not necessarily create similarities or elide differences economically, politically, socially, or intellectually. It asks us to move across national boundaries in ways that problematize national and local identities while referencing new forms of international alliances and networks. In turn, these new international communities and identities demand that we pay attention to the inequalities and differences that arise from new forms of globalization as well as from older histories of colonialism and racism. Our evolving curriculum seeks to address these changing identities, structures, and processes by incorporating new and revised theoretical perspectives and research that addresses them.