CARVING OUT A DISCIPLINE

Tracy M. Tefertiller '94 has been tracking the spending habits of 400 teenage girls. "I spend a lot of time at the mall and looking through Seventeen magazine," she says.

Caroline M. Mitchell '94 spent last summer in Nigeria studying a women's health and family planning center.

Tefertiller and Mitchell, who are both Women's Studies concentrators, approach their projects to study the position of women in society.

"Considering gender, some more, some less, is the unified approach that focuses the diverse body of studies," says part-time Director of Studies for the Committee on Women's Studies Juliet B. Schor, who is also senior lecturer on economics.

Women's Studies concentrators are a small, close-knit group of students who share an interest in gender and their feelings for the program.

"I love it," Caroline M. Mitchell '94 says. "I know almost everyone in my class. It's a really friendly place."

The concentration has grown from about seven to 12 students to 42 this year.

Supervised by an interdisciplinary committee which credits courses from departments ranging from government to sociology to music--students' plans of study vary widely.

"The concentration offers a lot of room for flexibility," says Debbie B. Stulberg '95. "My courses are from four or five different departments. Their philosophy is that it counts if it's within your area, however you define it."

`Where Everybody Knows Your Name'

Concentrators also laud the individual attention that the Women's Studies committee showers on them.

"Economics is such a huge department. It takes so long to feel your way around," says Tefertiller, a joint concentrator in economics and Women's Studies. "In women's studies, everyone knows my name, my thesis topics, what fellowships and grants I've applied for."

"I really feel that they have a concern for me as an individual, not just some ideal of the model concentrator," she says.

Schor and the Women's Studies committee's Assistant Director of Studies Andrea S. Walsh personally advise all of the students in the honors-only concentration. The heavy emphasis on advising is necessary since concentrators design their own studies.

Students must take three introductory courses in women's studies and year-long tutorials, but choose the remaining seven courses from a committee-approved list of courses in a number of departments.

Schor says graduates rated the concentration first in the quality of advising last year. She is equally enthusiastic about the undergraduates.

"It's a really talented group of people," she says. "They are very highly motivated, and [into] doing a lot of really interesting independent research. A lot of it is seen as very pioneering."

Popular Misperceptions

Concentrators feel that many Harvard students view women's studies as a "soft," politically charged discipline studied by artsy, radical feminists.

"When I first came in as a sophomore, I felt some trepidation. I thought that everyone was going to be really angst-ridden. But especially among my class, I think everyone's very happy-go-lucky," says Tefertiller.

"When I tell them what I'm concentrating in, people say, `Oh, how P.C. [politically correct],'" Annie Lederberg '96 says.

But the concentrators do share "the belief that women have been left out of the general curriculum, the belief that there should be some sort of equality," Mitchell says.

"Concentrators share the common view that women are important and women's issues are important," says Tefertiller. "I think they all would define themselves as feminists, but there's a spectrum of what that means. I'm more politically oriented. I'm critical of a lot of the philosophy because it doesn't apply to the real world."

Born Out of Controversy

From its inception, the women's studies department has come under fire as the product of liberal politicking rather than as a serious academic discipline.

Nevertheless, the faculty almost unanimously approved a concentration on Women's Studies in 1986.

At the meeting, the lone dissenter, Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, said, "The appearance of this proposal on the Faculty floor marks a foolish and almost pitiful surrender to feminism."

One administrator at the time also questioned the necessity for a women's studies concentration.

"Is women's studies a new distinct discipline or rather a topic within a variety of studies?" he asked, in a memo The Crimson received from the Faculty office with the names withheld.

One Wellesley scholar says advocates of women's studies at Harvard have struggled for years to overcome such attitudes. Harvard was the seventh of the eight schools in the Ivy League to establish a women's studies concentration.

"They were trying to create women's studies in the belly of the beast. Harvard thinks of itself as the keeper of the culture, and in general, it tends to be fairly conservative about what it lets into the culture," says Susan M. Reverby, professor of women's studies at Wellesley College.

Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literatures and Chair of the Women's Studies Committee Susan R. Suleiman says that while she agrees with Reverby's statements "to a large extent," the Faculty's ultimate support signaled the recognition that women's studies was a valid academic discipline.

"Harvard was not a leader of the pack, but at least it had the good sense to recognize what was going on," she says.

Suleiman says in the past Harvard was slow to recognize that valuable study could take place outside and between a standard system of deparments.

"In the past, there's been a kind of lack of imagination about how to define what should be taught," she says. "Within many disciplines, some of the best work is being done by people who are daring and able to combine different studies."

But seven years later after his dissent before the Faculty, Mansfield and other conservative critics reiterate their charges.

"It's not really women's studies, it's feminist studies," Mansfield says. "It's a little ladies' sewing circle. They don't like to talk to people out of their own viewpoint, even if it's other women."

A recent article in the conservative journal Peninsula shares Mansfield's concerns. "The philosophy of Women's Studies is little more than self-serving, not to the needs of women (which it actually disregards in the end), but to the feminist agenda and to its own own continued existence within the `academy.'"

Both Walsh and Schor disagreeing that the introductory courses offer a diversity of viewpoints.

"We are very open politically. To say that we represent a particular point of view doesn't understand the very nature of this concentration," Schor says.

Students also deny claims of a narrow agenda within the women's studies curriculum.

"A male friend who's a gov concentrator teases me about doing my soft women's studies stuff, learning about feminism and the party line. It's not about that. It's about looking at things from a different perspective," Mitchell says.

Camille Paglia, professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philidelphia and an outspoken critic of women's studies programs, criticizes the concentration for not having a scientific base. "To theorize about sex you have to first study the foundation," she says.

Suleiman counters that "you don't have to always start with biology; you don't have to start with cell division to know that women are different than men."

Because the concentration originated from resources already available at Harvard, its direction was largely dependent on the interests of professors already at Harvard, according to Suleiman.

"There were more women on the faculty in literature who happened to be interested in questions of gender," she says.

Since there are very few people working on the intersection of the natural sciences and gender issues, Suleiman says she does not foresee expansion into that area in the near future. Although many concentrators explore women's health issues and are pre-med, their focus is more oriented towards social policy than science, she says.

While most concentrators would define themselves as feminists, "people who say `feminists think' or `mainstream feminists think' are assuming certain views. That doesn't account for the diversity of feminism," Stulberg says.

Rather than trying to indoctrinate students with a particular feminist agenda, Walsh says Women's Studies 10a, a concentration prerequisite that she teaches jointly with Professor Lynne Layton, offers many different ways of defining feminism.

"The purpose of 10a is to present a whole range of feminist perspectives, and to show that gender theories do not exist in isolation," Walsh says. "For that matter, there are many, many definitions of feminism."

Suleiman says the concentration is only political insofar as it opposes discrimination and oppression against women.

"If it is political to claim that women should not be an oppressed group in society, and that historically and institutionally women have been an oppressed group," she says, "then I am proud to say that we are political."

"Who is kept at home? Who has to wear the veil? Who has their feet broken? Who is subjected to female circumcision so that they don't get any sexual pleasure?" Suleiman asks. "If to say that these practices are generally horrible is political, then I am proud to say that Women's Studies is political."

Suliman challenges the motives of the concentration's critics. "I defy any of them to claim that they are not political," she says.

Concentrators say their individual beliefs, both political and personal, cover a wide range.

Lederberg says she has found that the students "have a variety of perspectives and different points of view."

Rather than creating an atmosphere in which a particular view of feminism is espoused, Lederberg says that in her Women Studies courses the only lack of exchange occurs when students "avoid confrontation," because of "an excess of deference and unwillingness to challenge" their classmates' opinions.

Not a Department

At Harvard, women's studies is an interdisciplinary concentration, and not a department, as it is at Wellesley and the University of California system.

Some professors from these schools say that the lack of departmental status hurts the legitimacy of women's studies at Harvard.

"Achieving departmental status made a big difference for students to sort of have a sense that women's studies was a legitimate area of study," says Evelyn N. Glenn, chair of the University of California at Berkeley's department.

The number of majors at Berkeley increased by 50 percent after the university bestowed departmental status on the Women's Studies major, Glenn says.

Concentrations at Harvard which are administered by committees, such as Social Studies and History and Literature, enjoy considerable prestige.

Suleiman says not only was departmental status not feasible for Women's Studies when it was established, but it's also not necessary. She says that since Women's Studies is not a single discipline, the concentrators can benefit from the flexibility of the interdisciplinary committee in designing their programs.

And despite the barbs of conservative critics, the credibility and the size of the department continue to grow, evolving according to the needs and interests of the undergraduates it serves.