Women’s Studies in NYU CAS
New York University College of Arts & Science (CAS) / 1988
Figure 1. The Women’s Studies program description from the 2000-2002 CAS bulletin.
The first question I wanted to answer for this project was: When did NYU begin offering Women’s Studies courses? Before I ever learned about the Women in the Human Services program at SEHNAP, I knew of the undergraduate program in the College of Arts and Science, so I began by looking at the Archived Bulletins on the CAS website. The oldest one available online is the 2000-2002 bulletin and I was surprised to see that the program was then called Women’s Studies. The listing is three pages long, with sections about the Program, Faculty, and Courses. It notes that it is a requirement for students who major in Women’s Studies to also choose a concentration in any other department in CAS. The very next year in the 2002-2004 CAS bulletin, the program was called Gender and Sexuality Studies, which is its current name.
Figure 2. The Gender & Sexuality Studies program description from the 2002-2004 CAS bulletin.
I had to then turn to the Archives to find out if the program began before 2000 and requested every CAS bulletin from the 1980s and 1990s. I learned that the first NYU CAS Women’s Studies courses were offered in 1988. During one of my appointments, I unfolded a large pink Master List of fall 1988 courses with a note under the Women’s Studies Program section that listed Program Director for this new major was professor Carol Sternhell from the Department of Journalism and eight courses listed for the major.
Click here to see the Women's Studies listing in the 1988-1990 CAS bulletin, when it was in the Department in Interdisciplinary Studies along with Afro-American Studies, Latin American Studies, and Russian Area Studies.
Figure 3. Courses offered in the CAS Women’s Studies Program in fall 1988.
Figure 4. Courses offered in Women’s Studies in spring 1988.
I spoke with Sternhell, now Associate Professor of Journalism, in November 2023, and she told me that the program was her idea, and she was the first director. She was already thinking about Women’s Studies when she joined NYU’s faculty in 1981. Knowing that she couldn’t just start a new program at a new job, Sternhell instead started getting to know the feminists in various departments in her first few years. By 1987, she put together a group of women in several different departments who started meeting as the Arts and Science Women’s Faculty Caucus, and creating a Women’s Studies program was one of their first initiatives. The program was approved at a full faculty meeting in March of 1988.
Figure 5. First appearance of Women’s Studies in the 1988-1990 CAS bulletin.
When I asked Sternhell why she wanted to start the program, she said,
I was a dedicated feminist, and that was the most interesting material in the world to me. I felt like the most interesting question in the world was, how did the world get organized so that every culture, throughout history, anywhere on the planet, organized their society to think that men were better than women, and I wanted to explore that. I'm still a feminist, and it seemed like an intellectually vital area of study.
I also spoke to Professor Emerita of History Molly Nolan in November 2023, who was the Director of CAS Women’s Studies from 1996-98 when the program was moved to the History department. Nolan said that NYU at that time was “very retrograde,” but as historians, women’s history was a major topic, no matter the geographic field. She said,
It was second wave feminism, and we were all politically active and reading and then trying to figure out, how do we integrate it into the curriculum? How do we have courses that are about women? And so, it came from our own work and our own writing, and the interest of students.
As an aspiriing college administrator, I also wanted to learn more about the program from its early administrators. In November 2023, I spoke with Debra Michals and Anne Green, who worked as Associate Directors of the Women’s Studies program while they were PhD students in the History and English departments, respectively. Michals, now Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Chair of Gender, Diversity & Social Justice at Merrimack College, told me that the opportunity changed her career, saying, “That was one of my favorite jobs of my life. When that job ended, I knew that was the job I wanted some other time in my life again, and that's what I have.”
Green placed herself in the context of the university at that time for me. She explained how the program was underfunded, saying,
The fact that we were running it should tell you a lot right there, I mean, God bless us! I was like, what is happening here? To me there was a value question, and I was trying to understand, where is Women's Studies, and its place within the institution at that time of change.
While Green called her role a “passion project,” she acknowledged that it was foremost a job, and one with a lot of work. She also reflected on the connections between the distribution of labor in her work and throughout the university, saying:
Helping sign off on transcripts and chasing down the students and trying to intervene when they're dealing with the Bursar's Office and trying to attend meetings. I mean all the work. But when I think about the amount of labor that Debra and I put in, and our seasons running Women's Studies, and I think about all the adjuncting that was starting to go on, and all the TA's teaching, and then the unionization efforts that started right as I was departing. It kind of feels to me like a similar issue.
Figure 6. Fliers from events hosted by the Women’s Studies program in the 80s and 90s, including a screening and panel discussion of a documentary on pornography (left) and a spring lecture series that featured three contributors from the 1990 Routledge collection, Conflicts in Feminism (right).
Speaking with these early actors in establishing the CAS program was enlightening for me. I always think of WGS as a discipline that combines academics and activism, which is clear from the ways the programs emerged at colleges during the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. This was reiterated to me in a beautiful way in my conversation with Debra Michal. She so succinctly captured how my two passions of feminism and education come together. Though my interests are in administration rather than education, I love WGS as a site of communal and empowered learning. Michals said,
The history of Women's Studies programs is often that unique space where student affairs and academic affairs kind of merge together. And part of that is because all of these programs, including ours at NYU, came out of activism, came out of women saying: we need to have a program like this. And it came out of students saying: I want to see myself in what I'm learning. And when that happens, you're creating two things at once: You're creating an academic program, but you're also creating community. And that's the student affairs piece.
I bet you're going to hear this from everybody, that all of us have had to be constantly strategic, constantly thinking about administration and whether they're going to like these ideas, constantly thinking about how to market what we do and make ourselves relevant in the way that no other academic field has ever had to do. It also makes us vulnerable every single day, which we felt in the ‘90s. And still feel today.
References
Bulletins, 1986-1990; New York University Archives Collection of Course Bulletins; MC 286; Box 28; New York University Archives, New York University.
New York University. (2000). New York University Bulletin 2000-2002 College of Arts & Science. https://cas.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/casBulletin/documents/bulletin0002.pdf
New York University. (2002). New York University Bulletin 2000-2002 College of Arts & Science. https://cas.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/casBulletin/documents/bulletin0204.pdf
Women's Studies / Women's History, 1989-1997; New York University Archives Collection of Publications and Ephemera; MC 334; Box 156; New York University Archives, New York University.