The Abridged Herstory of Women's Studies at UNCG

The Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is one of the oldest of the 612 programs across the country. UNCG began its institutional life as a college for women in 1891--the first state sponsored school for the higher education of women in North Carolina. It became coeducational in 1963 when laws were amended to authorize admission of both men and women at all levels of instruction on all North Carolina State University campuses. Renamed the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the campus became a doctoral degree granting institution and today has approximately 16,000 students.

Since 1972, The Women's and Gender Studies faculty has been dedicated to continuing UNCG's historical concern with the lives of women and with the roles they play in society. The Women's and Gender Studies Program now offers an undergraduate major and minor, a graduate certificate, and the new MA degree. The program encompasses more than thirty courses with over seventy-five faculty affiliates from seventeen departments. Faculty members affiliated with the program are housed in departments and professional schools throughout the university, making Women's and Gender Studies the most well-established interdisciplinary program in the university.

With UNCG's history as a school for the higher education of North Carolina women, its community support from alumna of the Woman's College, its racially and culturally diverse student body, and its energetic faculty, the university offers an ideal environment for Women's and Gender Studies.

The central mission of the Women's and Gender Studies Program is to use gender, along with race and class, as a category of analysis, helping students investigate the role that gender plays in our history, art, politics, education, sports, health, 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.

The women and men who have participated either as instructors or students in UNCG's Women's and Gender Studies program find themselves rediscovering what drew them to the university in the first place. Women's and gender studies personalizes the curriculum, opening it up to critique and revealing the ways in which academic issues intersect with our deepest personal concerns and shape our responses to the world in which we live.