The Facets of Woman's Studies

Woman’s studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning women, gender and feminism; exploring our gender existence, how we perform femininity and masculinity and how this interacts with other aspects of our identities, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and sexuality. Women’s studies emerged in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as a concerned women being misrepresentation and trivialization in the higher education curriculum and as well as being excluded from many positions of power authority as colleges faculty and administrators. An example from the “ Women’s Voices /Feminist Vision” book written by Susan M.Shaw Janet lee was “the entire course in English or American literature to include not one novel written by a woman much less a woman of color. Literature was full of men’s ideas about women that often continued to stereotype women and justify their subordination.

In the women’s history there are three divided waves. The first wave become known in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, the second wave occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the present. The purpose of each wave of the movements was to improve women’s status in society and the conditions of women’s lives. But women never realized the commitment to personal change and to societal transformation until they started facing personal problems. For example; Jane O’Reilly describes how women were facing some problems when it came to working outside of the house all day and then coming home to work another full day doing the domestic tasks that are involved with being a wife and mother.

Gender is shaped by numerous of factors, such as gender-role socialization, interpersonal interactions, ...

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...st” it used facebook to distinguished how the designed for women is different from a facebook designed by feminists. C.V Harqual described “Women” as a social category, based on a person’s gender self-definition. When we talk about women we’re talking about a social category with predictable, empirically verifiable, modal preferences. We can measure what women as a group prefer, and we can design to appeal to these preferences, such as with the color pink, displaying romantic relationship status of each user. C.V Harqual also described “Feminists” as a social category, based on a person’s political orientation. Many women advocate feminism and many feminists are women. Some feminists are men, and some feminists choose to define themselves without using the terms like man or woman. Feminist have values they want to ‘build in’ to products, services and organizations.