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Feminism Is:
... a lens, a corrective vision.
The world comes into sharper focus. More becomes visible. You can see what you've been missing. Women's Studies is Not:
Anti-Male:
It is an intellectual and political means of seeking equality and justice for all people.

Victim Oriented:
It emphasizes women's potential for achievement and leadership.

Anti-Family:
It validates and examines the many forms family relations take in the United States and around the world.

A Fad:
It has a 30-year history of scholarship about women and gender that transforms conventional fields of knowledge.

About us...

The Department of Women's Studies at the Ohio State University

Women's Studies in an interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that places gender at the center of inquiry.

It raises many questions about gender as a socially and culturally constructed phenomenon that affects our personal lives, artistic expression, social relationships, and even the ways we think about ourselves and the world.

Women's Studies considers the ways class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age shape women's and men's experience.

Women's Studies is one of the fastest growing fields of inquiry to emerge in higher education in the past thirty years.

For more than 30 years, students and faculty members in Women's Studies at Ohio State have explored women's lives and gender issues in path-breaking and creative ways.

Women's Visions

Ways of Seeing: We rethink and study what women have been, what women have contributed to social change, and what women might become.
Visions of Change: We examine how traditional disciplines exclude women, and we supply new information to fill in the gaps.
Fresh Perspectives: We explore the diversity of women's experiences, and we build theories that account for differences as well as similarities among us.

In Women's Studies, our students find a supportive, intellectually challenging community; small class sizes; and close interaction with faculty within a large research university setting that offers extensive resources and opportunities.

Points of Pride

Prestige: One of the largest undergraduate Women's Studies programs in the country, with 150 majors, 120 minors, graduating 50-60 majors every year.
Cutting Edge Graduate Program : MA and PhD students engaged in interdisciplinary studies in global, national, and local topics.
Community Outreach: PeerPower, an undergraduate outreach program for local public schools, takes gender and diversity issues into the community.
International Outreach: The Afghan Women's Leadership Project, lining women leaders in Afghanistan with OSU resources.
Resources: A Women's Studies Library with 20,000 books and 100 current journals.
strong>National Visibility: Reading Women's Lives, a customized textbook used by over 100 colleges nationwide.
Award Winning: Faculty research that contributes to feminist scholarship and that envisions social change.

Faculty Research Topics

Women's oral histories in the Caribbean
Women filmmakers
Women's health and menopause
Gender and global capitalism in Thailand
The lesbian presence in film noir
Feminist responses to social conservatives
The women's movement in Venezuela
African-American women's narratives
Utopias and utopian concerns in feminist theory
Race, ethnicity, and motherhood in visual culture
The woman detective in popular culture
Women's experiences in political institutions
Democratic and postcolonial theory
Feminist social geography
Kinship and family in modern South Asia

Alumni Opportunities

Women's Studies enhances both individual and career development and is beneficial in fields such as:

law
social work
education
the health professions
government service
non-profit management
business
counseling
journalism
library science.

In addition, the interdisciplinary training and analytical skills our students acquire through course work in women's studies prepare them well for graduate work in a number of fields.