Introducing Women’s Studies

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that her being a woman was not irrelevant, but fundamental to the endeavour to theorise women’s position, is a simple but revolutionary idea. Looking back, as an undergraduate student, my frustration and lack of a vital and passionate connection to my studies — which saw men’s experience and definitions of themselves and the world as defining my experiences as a woman — could be understood. It was not until I became a postgraduate student of Women’s Studies that the previously uninspiring intellectual landscape was irrevocably transformed. Later, as a teacher of Women’s Studies in further, adult and higher education, traditional classroom practices such as a notion of the tutor as an unchallengable expert and an unquestioning acceptance of the ‘founding forefathers’ of knowledge such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, which characterised traditional learning, were inappropriate to the collective learning experience which was Women’s Studies.

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