The central mission of the Women's and Gender Studies Program is to use gender, along with race and class, as categories of analysis, to help students investigate the role that gender plays in our history, art, politics, education, sports, health, culture and family. The program grew out of the limitations that instructors perceived in the liberal arts curriculum as it was traditionally structured, with its overwhelming concentration on the perspective of privileged men. The program addresses issues of neglect, omission, and bias in curricula while honing those critical thinking skills vital to a liberal education. With the assistance of the community-based Friends of Women's and Gender Studies, the program sponsors visiting scholars, lectures, films, and conferences devoted to the advancement of women's and gender studies.

STUDENT LEARNING GOALS

•  To know how women's lives have been affected by social institutions around the world and throughout the United States ;

•  To investigate the history of ideas about gender;

•  To understand women's lives as they relate to the disciplinary areas of arts and sciences, education, business,and health-related professions;

•  To appreciate the variety of choices and limitations in women's lives as they are shaped by biology and society;

•  To explore all these areas by conducting research (either qualitative or quantitative), by reading deeply and widely and thinking and writing critically and reflectively;

•  To understand in critical context feminist theory;

•  To complicate understandings of gender with critical awareness of interrelationships to race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, nationality, and religion;

•  And to gain understanding of the interrelationships between theories and practices through fieldwork, observation,and discussion.