Youthful Folly

AS A NEWCOMER to the academic community, Women's Studies--like many Harvard freshmen--is self-conscious and slightly narrow-minded. But critics of Harvard's planned concentration in the area forget that Women's Studies has as much claim to independent existence as a score of other disciplines formed over the past 100 years.

The usual argument against the concentration goes something like this perhaps women have been slighted in the treatment of various established academic disciplines, and perhaps these fields ought to give greater weight to women's views and issues. However, women's views and issues should not be treated as an independent field because, while it offers new approaches to existing disciplines, the function of Women's Studies is more one of criticism than of innovation.

Those who argue against Women's Studies also point to the comparatively small number of works by or about women; they believe few of these evidence great thought. And they add that the field does not provide a true "liberal arts" education, because it is both narrow in scope and politically biased.

While these arguments are convincing, the critics who make them must also condemn other fields with limited foci in order to remain consistent. Their views apply to the better-established field of Afro-American Studies, as well as to other concentrations such as Sociology, Urban Studies, Soviet Studies, Asian Studies, and American History.

THE AMERICAN philosophy of education holds that all students should have a sampling of the many disciplines. However, students must also specialize in a specific field in order to learn scholarly techniques through prolonged devotion to a single subject.

As long as distribution or core requirements apply, we need not fear that student will remain ignorant of other subjects. As for the portion of their education that requires specialization, Women's Studies offers students far more diverse possibilities than do many established disciplines.

In American Literature, for example, a finite number of novelists and poets have suffered from merciless analysis in countless volumes of criticism, biography and comparison. Students seeking thesis topics must pick ever more obscure subjects for their original research, making the theses themselves increasingly abstruse and unreadable.

Women's Studies is a young field, and its possibilities have hardly been tapped. However, because of the subject's youth its scholars are often defensive, since they must not only conduct research, but also prove the validity of their discipline. They argue that male attitudes towards women have, until recently, prevented uniquely female perspectives from joining standard scholarship; as a result, they often have a political perspective alien to the Harvey Mansfields of this world. However, this in itself does not equate Women's Studies with "the study of left-handed people," as Mansfield would have it.

CONSIDER THE similar evolution of sociology: much of Durkheim's work is devoted to proving that sociology is a separate field that cannot be incorporated into the existing ones of psychology, philosophy and history. His work, and most sociological scholarship, can be considered to contain fixed political perspectives in many ways. It considers religion, for example, a social phenomenon rather than a divinely inspired necessity.

Once Women's Studies has gained similar acceptance, it will lose its current self-consciousness and with it some of the excesses that have suffered well-deserved parody. It still remains to explore the far more interesting questions of women's ill-acknowledged contributions to past scholarship and their unsung role in shaping history.

Women's Studies must be taken seriously, not mocked and undermined. Like other innovative disciplines, it needs time and space to mature.