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"The Death of Feminism at British Universities," Telegraph, February 8, 2008
"Last Woman Standing," Times Higher Education, January 31, 2008
"Farewell to 'Predictable, Tiresome and Dreary' women's studies," Independent, March 23, 2008
SO RAN THE HEADLINES across several of the major British national newspapers in the first quarter of 2008. Little wonder then that those outside of feminist academics in Britain began to mourn the demise of women's studies in the United Kingdom. But how true is this? In this report I explore the challenges endured by women's studies in Britain, the implications of these, and the factors to which we can attribute the reduction in institutions offering undergraduate degrees in women's studies. My perspective is that of a British academic who has spent over eight years on the executive board of our national women's studies body (the Women's Studies Network, now the Feminist and Women's Studies Association), including a couple of years as the co-chair.
First, some historical context. As in North America, women's studies in the United Kingdom (comprised of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) took genesis from the Second Wave of feminism, with the first women's studies classes being taught at Ruskin College, Oxford Llniversity, in 1973. Growth peaked in the 1980s, a decade that witnessed the establishment of a number of subdegree, degree, and graduate programs. By 1988, the Women's Studies Network (U.K.) Association (later the Feminist and Women's Studies Association, or FWSA) was formed, hosting national and international conferences since then. Women's studies quickly established itself as an area of high-quality education and was praised by Her Majesty's Inspectorate (the official government review of subject quality) in 1993 for the high standards found across the Linited Kingdom. However, not all battles for recognition were won: for example, the Research Assessment Exercise (the process through which departmental research is nationally assessed and through which government research monies are allocated) refused, in the first two rounds, to examine women's studies separately, preferring to create a subpanel under sociology. By the latest round, it was subsumed into the panel on interdisciplinary studies. At the same time, participation rates in higher education were increasing, reaching more than 40 percent of eigh teen-to-thirty-yearolds in England and Wales and over 50 percent in Scotland. In...