My Path to WGST

Hey, so here's my first entry. I'm not as current-event conscious as the other posters so my entries are more about feminism in my personal life. To start with, I am a Women's and Gender Studies major. I never expected to be in the major and kind of randomly fell into the department after two years of floundering in the liberal arts. This post is about how I became a WGST major.

I started college determined to study something I'd never studied before and quickly fell in love with the Sociology department and became a major. My mother began to cry of disappointment when she heard; both of my parents and grandparents are socy majors and have never used their degrees. She now believes that sociology is a family curse. After hearing that the Anthropology department had classes on monkeys, I signed up for an Anthro major as well (MONKEYS! In my head I imagined that we might pet baby lemurs all day and feed chimpanzees bananas...this turned out to be an extreme delusion and my grades suffered as I dreamed about petting and feeding monkeys all day). Coming around to summer term, I realized that there were no classes in either of my majors that I had not already taken. The closest department to my liberal arts education that was offering classes was WGST. I signed up for several classes, nervous about straying from what I knew.

The introductory class was a disaster! As a relatively reserved student, I had to participate in a mandatory performance festival and many classes consisted of stretching and jumping jacks. Embarrassed and insecure about the performance (which was scheduled on the largest party day of the summer, a day most professors normally cancel class), I negotiated my way into a small part introducing the play and then sat in the back with my nalgene and pregamed for the rest of my day. Determined to never take WGST classes again, I finished up my term and looked ahead.

In the fall, I took two cross-listed classes (as part of my Anthro major) within the WGST department and loved them! I realized that WGST was not about dancing or putting on a show, but a historical, social, and theoretical exploration of women, their history, and their place in society. Now that I had 4 credits in the department, I figured I might as well take 6 more classes and become a major. (I love studying one subject in depth. By graduation I will have taken 35 major classes and 2 distrib classes). I did not consider myself a feminist until Junior fall after realizing the feminism means supporting women's right to equality and not rioting or bra-burning. But that's another story.

In my WGST seminar this past fall, we discussed the implications of being a major. Unfortunately, being a WGST major carries a huge stigma, which all of my classmates had experienced. Most of their peers associated it with man-hating, lesbians, or simply an easy way to get a high GPA (out of honesty, I do have to admit that the WGST department does tend to have high median grades...which I sorely needed after my foray into monkeys). My parents asked if they could order my graduation invitations without listing my WGST major and even Career Services suggested I take it off of my resume if I wanted more call-back interviews. Even worse, they asked if I could mention it as simply "Gender Studies," as if the inclusion of "Women" made it a less legitimate area of study.

After several years of announcing my majors and then quickly murmuring that I was also a WGST major under my breath, I finally have the confidence to say it out loud. To start with, my close group of friends don't antagonize me over my major, make sandwich jokes, or ridicule me for my gender (as some of my other acquaintances have continually done). WGST involves just as much theory, literature, and critical analysis of any other liberal studies department. I shouldn't be ashamed because it focuses on "Women." It is rare for anyone to ridicule a African American Studies scholar or a Latin American Studies scholar (in person at least) because of the perceived racism that would involve. It should be no different for WGST (although blatant misogyny has been acceptable for centuries). I am sure it will take at least another 30 years before Women's Studies is seen in a respectful light, but in the meantime I will avidly defend my major.

The End. For good measure here's a picture of what I imagined my Anthro major would be like:

If only I could be Jane Goodall without the 30 years of living in the jungle...

[Photo credit to Michael Neugebauer and wildchimpanzees.org]