Transforming the Disciplines - 9781560239604

A jargon-free, non-technical, and easily accessible introduction to women's studies!

All too many students enter academia with the hazy idea that the field of women's studies is restricted to housework, birth control, and Susan B. Anthony. Their first encounter with a women's studies textbook is likely to focus on the history and sociology of women's lives. While these topics are important, the emphasis on them has led to neglect of equally important issues. Transforming the Disciplines: A Women's Studies Primer is one of the first women's studies textbooks to show feminist scholarship as an active force, changing the way we study such diverse fields as architecture, bioethics, history, mathematics, religion, and sports studies.

Although this text was designed as an introduction to women's studies, it is also rewarding for upper-level or graduate students who want to understand the pervasive effects of feminist theory. Most chapters provide a bibliography or list of further reading of significant works. Its clear, jargon-free prose makes feminist thought accessible to general readers without sacrificing the revolutionary power of its ideas.

In almost thirty essays, covering a broad range of subjects from anthropology to chemistry to rhetoric, Transforming the Disciplines exemplifies the changes achieved by feminist thought.

Transforming the Disciplines:

• combines a high standard of writing and scholarship with personal insight
• includes both traditional academic arguments and alternative, non-agonistic forms of discussion
• embraces an international scope
• challenges traditional assumptions, models, and methodologies
• offers an inter- and multidisciplinary approach
• strengthens readers’understanding of the big picture not only for women but for all disempowered groups
• critiques feminism as well as patriarchal society