As Women’s History Month comes to a close, Crimson Education is concluding a month dedicated to celebrating women’s contributions throughout history with a blog dedicated to the next generation of leaders. For ambitious young people with career aspirations in women’s advocacy, human rights, social services or something similar, we’ve compiled a list of 10 US universities with renowned Womens & Gender Studies programs.
If you are you interested in a degree in Womens & Gender Studies, a related minor, or an interdisciplinary program, the following list will give you a great guide as to some of the best programs the US has to offer. The first step is to research which universities offer the curriculum you’re looking for, along with the faculty, facilities and other factors that fit your criteria. You then need to decide as to which degree and universities is best suited to you.
Harvard University
Harvard offers a degree called Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality which brings together a wide range of academic fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences (including history, literature, visual studies, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, LGBT studies, political science, psychology, and biology, to name a few). As an interdisciplinary field of study, Women, Gender, and Sexuality pay close attention to how social norms have changed over time and how they vary across cultures.
Yale University
Students majoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale take a series of core courses, develop an individual area of concentration, and write a year-long or single-term senior essay. The program demands work that is interdisciplinary, intersectional, and international. Individual concentrations evolve along with students’ intellectual growth and academic expertise.
Pomona College
The Gender & Women’s Studies (GWS) Program at Pomona focuses on the culturally and historically specific production of sexual difference, the wide-ranging impact of feminist research, and how gender intersects with other social forces such as race, sexuality, class, and colonialism. The GWS program offers a rigorous critical inquiry into these multiple forms of difference, challenging conventional assumptions about women, sexuality, and gender roles.
Amherst College
To make sense of the world and make changes in the world around us, Amherst’s Women and Gender Studies graduates need a firm understanding of the histories and politics that have shaped conversations around women’s rights, sexual rights, reproductive justice, and trans and queer identities. Coupled with Amherst’s open curriculum, Amherst’s Women and Gender Studies program heavily encourages interdisciplinary study.
Williams College
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) has existed in some form at Williams for over 30 years. Williams formalized Womens Studies into a program in 1983, and name changes over the years have reflected increasing attention in the interdisciplinary field to issues of gender and sexuality studies. Integral to the WGSS program is the idea of intersectionality – that race, ethnicity, class, ability, nationality, and religion are essential factors in any critical understanding of gender and sexuality.
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program facilitates the interdisciplinary study of social relations of power in various texts, practices, and cultural and historical contexts. The program emphasizes the interrelationships among gender and sexuality, race, class, nation, and ability and connects such inquiry to local and global politics. Gender and Sexuality Studies brings feminist and LGBTQ theory in conversation with research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences through courses offered across Swarthmore’s three academic divisions.
Middlebury College
The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSFS) at Middlebury is a dynamic interdisciplinary field that examines the social construction of gender and sexuality. GSFS courses utilize gender and sexuality as a mode of analysis, and Middlebury GSFS graduates pay particular attention to how gendered ideologies concerning race, class, ability, and other ways through which people experience the world.
Bowdoin College
At Bowdoin, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies encourages students to interrogate how gender expressions such as masculinity and femininity and social norms around sexuality, reproduction, and the family vary across cultures and historical periods. The curriculum challenges the privileging of some categories of identity and experience over others and explores such patriarchal/matriarchal hierarchies’ social and political implications.
Wellesley College
Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley, an all-women’s institution, provides a venue to explore the complex social realities that lead one to value the environment a women’s college can offer. Issues of women’s employment, healthcare, and social roles from the angles offered by each of these different disciplines. In many ways, the Women’s Studies Department encapsulates the liberal arts ideal, providing a classroom environment where students can critically analyze the world in which we live.
Vanderbilt University
Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt is an interdisciplinary department that encourages the development of critical perspectives in both intellectual and activist contexts. Gender and Sexuality Studies teaches students to re-examine traditional beliefs and to recognize that gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and nationality are crucial aspects of identity and can be understood primarily in their intersections.