Book on the Evolution of Women’s Studies Should be Required Reading for All who Romanticize Feminism’s Origins

Anyone who still thinks feminism began with moderate aims will be quickly disabused of that false idea

For my series on the history of feminism at Studio B, I recently reviewed a book called The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change.

Published in 2008, it is a collection of retrospective essays by leaders of Second Wave feminism, showcasing its political radicalism and activist intensity. The book should be required reading for all those who believe feminism was once a rational and genuinely liberatory movement.

With a curriculum that included such bigoted treatises as Susan Lydon’s “The Politics of Orgasm,” which argued that women’s sexuality was “defined by men to benefit men,” Susan Griffin’s “Rape: the All-American Crime,” which alleged that rape was actually condoned by a misogynistic society, Lucy Komisar’s “Violence and the Masculine Mystique,” which claimed that “The ultimate proof of manhood is sexual violence,” and Sidney Abbot’s “Sappho was a Right on Woman,” which called women to lesbianism as the only route to becoming “a whole human being,” the Women’s Studies emphasis was from the beginning radically anti-western, anti-family, anti-white, pro-Marxist, anti-heterosexual, pro-lesbian, rape-obsessed, and above all anti-male. (See my video here for a full explication.)

But there’s more.

The Evolution of American Women’s Studies also deserves sustained attention for what it reveals about the endemic feminist mindset: not only its anti-male bigotry (naked and unashamed throughout); not only its risible insistence on seeing women everywhere and in all contexts as an oppressed class; but also in the ideology’s alarming and unselfconscious intransigence, self-deception, and imperviousness to evidence.

Feminism not only spreads hatred and false beliefs, but even when presented with facts and conditions that reveal the falseness of the beliefs, it is incapable of self-correction.

Reading the book, one is struck by the feminist authors’ sense of themselves as dissident rebels, valiantly fighting an entrenched old boys’ network that allegedly disliked women and did not believe in their intellectual capacity. The authors seem not to recognize that their claims of bias are directly contradicted by evidence of the ease with which women’s studies programs were established. According to the book’s editor, 300 women’s studies programs and countless individual courses were offered in the decade of the 1970s alone.

Anthology editor Alice Ginsberg opens her section on the history of women’s studies with an anecdote highlighting the alleged opposition she and her feminist colleagues had to overcome. She quotes a fellow activist:

“The first public meeting of my women’s liberation group in the mid-1960s was held in the ‘Ladies Room’ of the Pennsylvania State University student union building [….] When the university denied us a meeting room, we marched down the hall, crossed out ‘Ladies,”’ put up ‘Women,’ propped open the door, and proceeded to have our meeting in the outer restroom area” (p. 10).

Note the pointless act of faux-rebellion in crossing out ‘Ladies.’ Then as now, trivial gestures characterized a movement in love with risk-free dissent. We don’t learn why the group was denied a meeting room. Perhaps it was because the university didn’t think women’s liberation had anything to do with academic research or scholarship. Perhaps there were simply no rooms available on the day the feminists wanted to meet. I’ve had groups denied meeting space for various reasons. The anecdote tells us nothing about the actual struggles of feminists to establish women’s studies programs. What is germane is that within five years of a ragtag band of women’s libbers setting up in the women’s can, they had degree-granting college programs all across the country.

A second statement in the same chapter attempts to make a similar point about the difficulties of the feminist enterprise and the battle-hardened sensibilities it produced. A feminist leader recalls how “During the three years we fought for a program, we accrued an education, not only in feminist politics, but in university politics, becoming aware that understanding how to make our way through the system would be a necessary prerequisite to our success” (p. 11).

Obviously, any attempt to establish a new area of study requires some understanding of university politics and procedures. Again, what is striking in the statement is not what the writer thinks important but what she glosses over as unremarkable. Her group “fought” for “three years” to receive the funding and support to offer not only a few courses but an entire new program!

For anyone familiar with university administration, this is a remarkably short period of time in which to establish an academic program. In fact, it is astounding that in three short years, any university would accept a whole new program founded not on scientific research or a recognized body of knowledge by accredited experts, but instead on wild theories, radical and indeed hateful assertions, and activist demands.

Everything in this book paints a picture of an institution of higher learning that presented next to no opposition to the ideological transformation of the university into an institute of higher indoctrination, the consequences of which have been incalculable.

Another example comes in a later chapter by feminist leader Paula Rothenberg, who celebrates herself and her colleagues for their alleged can-do attitude in her essay “Women’s Studies: The Early Years.” Fondly reminiscing about the movement’s glory days, she writes, “If you found a problem, you acted to solve it. When you realized that the lack of childcare on campus made it difficult if not impossible for young women with children to attend school, you pressured the college to create a childcare center” (p. 79).

Now that is feminist ingenuity! “Pressure the college” (i.e. make a demand of the old boys who built and staffed the institution) to “create a childcare center.” Then take credit for “solving” the problem of an allegedly anti-female institution. No recognition or thanks are given to the men who agreed to feminist demands, allocated always-scarce funding to a women’s centre (likely one that excluded male students), and did the work to make it happen. This woman is so busy patting herself on the back that she doesn’t even notice the irony.

Styling themselves heroines of resistance, the feminist authors are not sympathetic to students who, in their turn, resisted their feminist agenda. Such resistance is never given any respect. Judith Lorber reports that most students in the 1970s and 1980s were “very eager to learn about feminism, and very open to feminist ideas and perspectives” (154). But there were some exceptions. She notes that “more conservative women were resistant to these ideas and some even dropped a course rather than have to confront ways of thinking that challenged their values” (p. 154-55).

It’s hard not to notice the condescending assumption that Lorber knows why these “more conservative women” dropped the course. First, how did she know that they were conservative? Notice the knee-jerk dismissiveness. Second, she assumes without evidence that these women were made uncomfortable by the alleged “challenge” to their staid and conformist thinking. But perhaps they weren’t “challenged” at all. Perhaps they were bored by the predictability of the ideas presented. Perhaps they found the anti-male fervor irrelevant to their lives or repugnant in its hatefulness. Perhaps they simply didn’t find the course content useful or persuasive. None of these possibilities, or any others, seems to have been considered by Lorber. Refusal of feminism is always perceived as testimony to ignorance or misogyny.

In one of the most unintentionally poignant and disturbing passages in the book, one of the authors, Ann Russo, relates how a male student’s anger taught her about the importance of “all the conditions that brought us to where we are in that moment” (p. 145). She tells the story in some detail, but its larger significance seems lost on her:

“I think often of an experience I had many years ago. I was teaching a course on violence against women, and I had a young man in my class that was relentless in his critique of feminism and his anger at and blame of survivors of sexual assault. As an adjunct teacher with little experience, I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to kick him out, and I had trouble getting him to stop. At the last session of the class, he again berated me and the class. I finally asked him to stay after class so that I could tell him about the harm that he had caused by his hostile attitude and words. He stayed after the class and began pouring out his anger. I listened. Within five minutes, we were sitting down and he began to tell me about his own history as a survivor of sexual assault and how bad he felt about himself. He talked of suicide, of more punishment. We talked about ways to understand and address these feelings and I shared some community resources that might assist him as a male survivor of sexual abuse. I’m not excusing his behavior in the classroom, and yet, when I’m faced with similar young men and women in my classes, I try to take time to listen to what lies underneath their resistances” (p. 144-45).

Well, good for her. Notice her insistence, even in reflection, that the male student’s reaction was to “blame” “survivors of sexual assault.” Isn’t it far more likely that what he was blaming was not survivors but the knee-jerk assumption that only women are victims of sexual violence? How could it have taken her an entire term to have a conversation with a student to discover the source of his anger? And how ironic is her claim that during the conversation she “shared some community resources that might assist him as a male survivor of sexual abuse.” What resources would those have been? A pamphlet written by feminists for women? There were no resources for men back then—there still aren’t in the vast majority of cities—and Russo must know that (or, more likely, she remains blithely indifferent to the experiences of male victims). Her student had likely already looked for help and had the experience of being told that help existed for women only. And then he had to sit through a class with a feminist teacher who claimed that sexual violence was solely a women’s issue.

What is most appalling about the story is that it never made this feminist professor rethink any of her foundational assumptions about “violence against women,” or the marginalization of male experience. In fact, she never mentions victimized men in the rest of her essay; the main issue confronting her as a feminist is her righteous opposition to “a racist, classist, imperialist, ableist, or transphobic feminism”; the list of bigotries doesn’t include hatred of men as a group, which continues not to bother her.

Reading these essays reinforces my awareness of the power of victimhood ideology over its adherents, how it warps their ability to think and respond accurately to the world. A 2020 study by 4 Israeli researchers concluded that the tendency to victimhood is an identifiable personality type that may have no correlation with actual victimhood and that transforms the way an individual relates to others and their society. The personality tendency is characterized above all by a strong need to be recognized as a victim; by belief in one’s own immaculate morality and inability to accept criticism; by lack of empathy for the suffering of others; and by a tendency to interpret everything through the victimhood lens.

Moreover, the researchers have found that people with the tendency to interpersonal victimhood believe themselves fully justified in taking revenge on others and are unwilling to relinquish belief in their own self-proclaimed innocence.

All of the contributors to the volume about the evolution of women’s studies exemplify such traits, and the book strongly reveals the dangers for society when self-perceived victims establish themselves in positions of power and influence. They are unable to change their self-conception and display a profound lack of empathy for those they regard as responsible for their persecution.

Hatred of men, false victimology, research bias, indoctrination of young people: none of these problems is mentioned even once in this anthology. These feminist academics continue to insist that academia must be governed above all, as Alejandra Elenes insists, by “a commitment to social justice” (p. 180). Their deep self-deception offers disturbing evidence of feminism’s corruption of academia.