By Bruce Bawer
No sooner had I delivered a eulogy for Black Studies – it appeared here on May 19 – than I became aware that Women’s Studies, too, is in critical condition.
Both disciplines date back half a century or more, but Black Studies came first, for
obvious reasons. Blacks, more than any other demographic group in America, had a legitimate right to be regarded as oppressed. Martin Luther King, Jr., called for racial equality and a colorblind society, and won over millions of white Americans with his biblical eloquence and nobility of vision. But once bigotry had given way, in large part, to white guilt and goodwill, a vast band of black hustlers materialized, eager to exploit the situation. Dr. King had quoted from the Bible; if these rapacious cynics had read anything – and some of them actually hadn’t read anything, because they were barely literate – it was most likely Mao’s Little Red Book or the memoirs of Huey Newton.
Holding up major universities as if they were robbing a liquor store, these thugs, often with the help of mobs of striking students, pressured the administrators into creating Black Studies Departments for them to run, even though they had no scholarly justification to offer for these things, no background whatsoever in education, and no motive other than to cash in while turning out new generations of activists drenched in race hatred. The first such department predated Dr. King’s murder by two months: it was founded at San Francisco State University in February 1968, after the longest student strike in the history of American higher education. It didn’t take long for feminists to observe this new development and say: “Hey, what about us?” After all, the guiding principle of second-wave feminism – the first wave had consisted of the suffragettes and suffragists of the early twentieth century – was that women were every bit as oppressed as blacks. If the first-wavers had sought equality, the second-wavers demanded liberation.
The women in question, of course, were almost all members of the white middle class and upper-middle class, and the leaders whose books they parroted tended to say very silly things. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, held up Soviet society as an example to be emulated in the West. Betty Friedan, a suburban Marxist, wrote that women who aspired to the life of a housewife were “in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.” Kate Millett told American women that they were living in a “patriarchy.” Germaine Greer preached sexual liberation. Others, such as Mary Daly and Robin Morgan, were openly lesbian and hence existed from the beginning in a tension with many of their fellow feminists, some of whom (notably Friedan) despised homosexuality with a passion while others simply believed that the disproportionate number of lesbians in the movement was not good for business. There were other divisions: while some feminists stressed that they weren’t anti-male, others, such as Susan Brownmiller, Catharine MacKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin, viewed pretty much all heterosexual men as rapists and inveighed not only against pornography but against heterosexual intercourse itself.
Second-wave feminism didn’t last terribly long as a part of mainstream American culture. But instead of fading away, it found a long-term home on campuses around the country. Although in the 1950s and 60s three or four U.S. colleges had offered courses focused on contemporary women’s lives, the nation’s first full-fledged Women’s Studies program was inaugurated in 1970 at San Diego State University. Soon there were many more. Like their Black Studies counterparts, they weren’t run by scholars; to quote my friend Phyllis Chesler, who witnessed these developments, herself a veteran writer about women, they were run by “socialists, communists, and careerists” whose main talent was for “taking over institutions.” The best of the second-wave feminists, in Chesler’s estimation, “were anarchic, eccentric, and highly independent nonconformists” who “spoke truth clearly, not in postmodern academic voices”; but the women who created Women’s Studies were of an ilk, seeing themselves as a “sisterhood,” a “collective,” that was centered not only on feminist “consciousness-raising” but also on racism, colonialism, and imperialism, those new hobbyhorses of the left.
Eventually many Women’s Studies Departments changed their names to include the word “gender,” an indication that they’d broadened their ambit to include the study of men (through a feminist lens, of course) and of all things “queer,” a label that referred not just to homosexuality but to any deviation from the norm. Earlier, there had been considerable ideological differences among the second-wave feminists, but now a rigid orthodoxy soon hardened into place, incorporating such newfangled concepts as intersectionality and social constructionism. As a result, the once-hallowed works of Friedan, Millett, and others were soon dropped down the memory hole. Then, over time, the orthodoxy shifted to place greater emphasis, for instance, on lesbians and women of color.
Then third-wave feminism came along, led by such deep thinkers as Carol Gilligan, who pushed gender separatism, and Peggy McIntosh, who argued that women and people of color are “relational” and “inclusive” in their thinking while white men are not. The growing dedication to race, moreover, has made it a no-no in Women’s Studies for a white woman to speak up for genuinely oppressed women in sub-Saharan Africa or the Muslim world; to do so, you see, would, in the words of the feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, amount to an attempt to “save the brown woman from the brown man,” and hence to an act of sheer racism. One last point about Women’s Studies in the age of third-wave feminism: increasingly, it has become driven not only by ideology but by feelings, with many courses resembling group-therapy sessions (although it must be said that many Women’s Studies stalwarts have rejected this development).
In short, Women’s Studies has from the start been a blight on real education. Which made it delightful to discover, from a recent article for the Guardian by Joan Wallach Scott, a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, that courses in Women’s and Gender Studies “are shutting down across the U.S.” Unsurprisingly, the first closing, in 2023, was at New College in Florida, a formerly “progressive” state-run institution that was transformed dramatically under the guidance of Governor Ron DeSantis, whose appointees to the Board of Trustees – the most famous being Christopher Rufo .. eliminated DEI programs, strengthened the traditional Western Civilization curricula, and, yes, put the kibosh on Women’s Studies. Public universities in other red states have followed suit. In February, Texas A&M’s board of regents voted to end its Women’s and Gender Studies programs. These new moves, noted Scott, come in the wake of President Trump’s 2025 executive order entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.
Scott offered a theory about the reason for Trump’s executive order: “it’s clear as day,” she contended, inanely, that “[t]he abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men” who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s island and “whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds, whether they actually slept with the women on offer or simply shared Epstein’s fantasies in order to gain influence or funding.” As if this theory weren’t baffling enough, Scott went on to assert that “[g]ender studies brought a critical lens to the biological determinism Trump invokes.” In other words, gender studies encouraged college studies to reject scientific fact and embrace instead a model of human sexuality that is centered not on the two biological sexes but, rather, on an infinite range of genders, which are thoroughly fluid psychological constructs that exist independent of biology.
It’s hilarious to see a professor emeritus at an institution most famously identified with Albert Einstein to be making such preposterous arguments. It’s also remarkable to see just how far Women’s Studies has strayed from its origins. For all their failures and fatuities, every single one of the major second-wave feminists, if presented with, say, the absurdity of males claiming to be females in order to win women’s athletic competitions, would have denounced it without hesitation. But today we live in an America where Donald Trump, considered by feminists to be the epitome of male chauvinism, is standing up for real women while Women’s Studies – now usually known as Women’s and Gender Studies – reflexively subordinates the interests of real women to those of psychologically damaged and potentially dangerous men who profess to be women. (Scott goes on to accuse Trump of standing for “a politics of masculine rule” and “the predations of toxic masculinity.” Recall that when Bill Clinton was in hot water for his antics with Monica Lewinsky, Gloria Steinem, the editor of Ms. who was probably the most famous feminist of the day, ardently defended him – one of many reminders that professional feminism is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.)
In April, another Texas university took a positive step on the Women’s Studies front. According to an article in The Conversation by Henry F. Fradella, Texas Tech plans to “phase out all academic credentials centered on sexual orientation or gender identity” and to prohibit graduate students from writing “‘degree-culminating’ theses or dissertations on sexual orientation or gender identity.” (I must admit that I don’t know what sexual orientation is doing there, since it is, after all, a real thing.) The new policy, added Fradella, would also require faculty “to teach in compliance with a 2025 Texas law that declares there are ‘only two human sexes’” and to refrain from “teaching about gender fluidity or gender as a spectrum. There are narrow exceptions to this rule, such as discussions about intersex traits.” (Which makes sense, given that intersexuality, although exceedingly rare, is also a real thing.) Now, between prehistoric times and somewhere around A.D. 2010, these new rules about gender ideology would hardly have seemed radical; but Fradella, a professor at Arizona State, feels obliged to maintain, preposterously, that “there is substantial scientific literature that shows people’s biological variation does not fit a strict binary model,” and to imply that Texas Tech’s new rules violate a half century of Supreme Court rulings on “viewpoint discrimination.”
There are other colleges where Women’s Studies is in trouble. In May, as Emma Whitford reported at Inside Higher Ed, the board of trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted “to reject the appointment of a women’s studies professor whose hire had been approved by faculty and administrators.” The prospective appointee was Kiran Asher, who teaches “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” (yet another common variation on the Women’s Studies moniker) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In response to her turndown, Asher, who had been interviewed for the position of distinguished professor, charged that many “women of color in fields like mine, folks that do gender work, race work, social justice work, non-Christian work, Islamic studies—have been denied tenure…it’s all systematic.”
What exactly has Asher done to be considered for a position as distinguished professor? Here’s what UM Amherst’s website has to say about her accomplishments: “Asher’s research interrogates the gendered and racialized dimensions of social and environmental change in the global south as well as the meanings and practices of feminist ‘field work.’” In brief, the usual gobbledygook. She appears to have written only one book, a monograph entitled Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands (Duke University Press, 2009). Asher’s accusation of systematic prejudice is hilarious; these days, the only way for somebody with one seventeen-year-old monograph to her name to be appointed a “distinguished professor” is to be a female “person of color.”
No, Women’s Studies isn’t gone yet. But the signs are good. It’s almost as if common sense is reasserting itself on campus.
On some campuses, anyway.
First published in Front Page Magazine
