About Women's Studies

Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary field with its beginnings in the Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960's. Women's Studies arose from the curiosity of faculty and students about their history, their lives, and their fellow women, rather than from a nineteenth century disciplinary base. As the field has expanded, from compensatory or recuperative scholarship to work increasingly devoted to complex theoretical and empirical studies, so has our department's pedagogical vision and orientation.

Areas of study include gender theory (in the humanities and the social sciences, and increasingly in the natural sciences), empirical studies (in areas as diverse as primatology, classical philology, and international relations), and empirical work in such interdisciplinary areas as East Asian culture, post colonial studies, film studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

What You Can Do with Women's Studies

Among our alumnae are filmmakers, doctors, artists, lawyers, professors, writers, librarians, counselors, teachers, and a rabbi. Majoring in Women's Studies at Barnard teaches students to view the world with a complex analytical approach, to have a conscious point of view, and to retain a sense of responsibility to other women and of the need to work for women throughout their lives.