Theories of Women’s Studies

Women’s Studies investigates the world from women-centred perspectives which cross the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines. Thus every issue, every question is material for Women’s Studies. The worldwide development of Women’s Studies during the 1970s and 1980s presented a radical challenge to the male-centred bias which dominated knowledge-making at the time.

Originally published in 1983, in this book feminist scholars discuss the assumptions and aims of Women’s Studies, its connections with the women’s movement, its research, its teaching and its emerging methodologies.

The contributors come from a range of disciplines: the humanities, the social and natural sciences, and from international backgrounds, primarily the USA, and Britain, Germany and Switzerland. They are united in working to develop a trans-disciplinary approach to the generation and distribution of knowledge and it is these new questions and their implications that demonstrate the exciting potential of a feminist education in women’s international quest for social change.

Gloria Bowles is the founding coordinator of UC Berkeley women’s studies, which was formed in the mid 1970s after she and other women in the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Berkeley realized there were no women on the voluminous reading lists for their Ph.D. exams in the mid 1970s. She and Renate Klein, then a student, edited Theories, essays on how to form programs and do feminist research.

Dr Renate Klein is a Swiss-Australian biologist and social scientist who has been a feminist women’s health activist since the early 1980s. She was Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne until 2006. She is the (co) editor/(co) author of 19 books, among them Theories of Women’s Studies, Test-Tube Women, Infertility, Radically Speaking and Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation. Since 1991, she is also Director and Publisher at Spinifex Press.