Reflections on Living in the Transition:
The Women's Studies Rite of Passage
by Julie Hill Barton

People often ask me why I am pursuing a graduate degree in Women's Studies. When I struggle to respond, I feel a little like a misunderstood artist. Based on my response, people will either think I'm brilliant and ahead of my time or terribly confused.

While Women's Studies is not a new discipline, especially at SCSU where Women's Studies has had a strong presence since 1971, the discipline itself is a scary consideration for many academic and cultural traditionalists. It is thoroughly interdisciplinary. It seeks to challenge truths rather than to reinforce them. Its scholars are predominantly female. These traits sometimes yield skeptical glances from those unfamiliar with and wary of Women's Studies.

So when I'm responding to that inevitable question about why I am pursuing this Master's degree, I usually fumble around and come up with some half-true response. I leave feeling frustrated that I couldn't articulate the passion and vigor with which we Women's Studies scholars approach our academic discipline. So I'm taking the opportunity as a participant in this wonderful newspaper, to craft my own ideal response to this question. In a perfect world, that response would sound something like this:

In Women's Studies, we believe that conceptions of sex and gender are not predestined by nature, but rather constructed by human ethos and thought. Thus, we invite challenges to our assumptions about gender. We think critically about the world's hierarchies. In our classes, both women and men analyze, explore, and critique patriarchal and sexist knowledge. We try to understand the complex web of experiences, assumptions and thinking that creates knowledge. We try to understand every side of each issue. Ours is a journey of thought and deconstruction. We work hard to reexamine our conceptions of race, class, and gender.

We take women's troubling experiences, such as domestic violence and rape, and examine why, how, and when they occur. We take scholarly approaches to understanding the experience and theory of women's lives. Sometimes, we then work with organizations outside of our classroom and places of research, to use our findings to foster real world change and understanding.

We are filling our educational gaps. For example, Women's History exists because for many years traditional History excluded and marginalized women. Try to conjure the faces of English's literary "canon" and you'll come up with almost all white men. Professors and students of English and History who resurrect and study women, whether they acknowledge it or not, are Women's Studies scholars. Women's Studies is now inherent in almost every discipline in the humanities and we are working hard to ensure that women's thoughts, experiences and voices are studied and heard.

The next time the inevitable question comes careening my way, maybe I'll pull this article out of my pocket and read a few sentences out loud. Then I'll fold it up, slip it back into my pocket, and envision the day when the question won't come up at all.