Feminism Unfinished

muralists working in the Southwest: Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco, Sonya Fe, Carmen Lomas Garza, Ester
Hernández, Judithe Hernández, Yolanda López, Patricia Rodríguez, and others produced a virtual
explosion of grassroots feminist imagery. The greatest gains have been literary. Female novelists, short-
story writers, poets, and essayists of all racial/ethnic groups now abound, although the most influential
book review outlets still disproportionately ignore them, and “chick lit” is still a category inviting
disdain. Slowly female playwrights are getting work produced even on Broadway.
Perhaps the biggest gender change in high culture was the transformative impact feminism had on the
universities. Women now earn more BAs and PhDs than men do, and this resulted in part from a change in
who is teaching them. The young feminists of the 1970s and before rarely met a female professor, and that
mattered: even the kindliest male professors rarely mentored their female students equally with their male
students. All three of us college professors writing this book, like all professional women and college
students, benefited directly from feminism and the affirmative action programs pushed by the movement. I
never had a female college or university instructor, and was never taken seriously as a student. In graduate
school I was one of two women studying history, and we two, unlike the men, were never invited to the
dinners with visiting scholars and never recommended for jobs. As I write, in 2013, I work for a
department that is half female, and women receiving PhDs in history outnumber the men. Similar gains
now show in most humanities fields, while women remain minorities, even small minorities, in the
sciences.
This change happened on two levels. First, women students, armed with the feminist critique of
androcentric—often called patriarchal—curricula, demanded change, and already in 1970 the first
women’s studies program opened. Before long there were hundreds, and today it is rare for a college or
university not to have a women’s studies program. Second, women began earning higher degrees and,
thanks to anti-discrimination complaints and women’s caucuses within professional organizations, got
hired as faculty. Once in universities, they soon made it impossible for traditionalists to maintain that they
were inferior scholars, and they also began to mentor women students, which in turn created more
professional women.
Academic women transformed not only who taught but also what was taught. In anthropology and
sociology, some gendered research had been traditional, but economics, history, and literature ignored
gender. For a scholar to write about women was to write about something unimportant, while men took on
the “big questions.” In literature, women’s writing, with a few exceptions, was a marginal genre. The
generation entering the universities in the 1970s changed that. Scholarship about women and gender
flourished to the extent that by the 1980s, students often learned at school what the previous cohort of
feminists had reinvented. The bottom-up demand for women’s studies courses created, in a feedback loop,
more jobs for women in the colleges and universities. Women’s studies in turn nurtured gay, now LGBT,
studies programs and scholarship. Soon scholars and courses began to examine masculinity as a gendered
construction as well.
Much of “women’s studies” happened outside academic institutions. Throughout the country 1970s
women’s liberation activists created “women’s schools,” and many still continue. They reflected
women’s desire to learn material that had previously been offered only to men—classes in auto
mechanics and self-defense were ubiquitous—but also material that would develop their movement:
classes in women’s history, feminist theory, and economics. They both reflected and strengthened
women’s confidence that they could take on “male” work, from biology to truck driving. Many of the
classes at women’s liberation schools differed only slightly from consciousness raising, because they
provided opportunities for women to meet in small groups, while other classes involved extensive
reading and study.