In 1976, a group of six women faculty members at App State formed the academic program then called “Women’s Studies.” They came from anthropology, art, sociology, English, history and interdisciplinary studies, and were co-chaired by Maggie McFadden and Helen Lewis.
Less than a decade beforehand, women students at App State were forbidden from wearing pants in classrooms, the library or the dining hall on Sundays. They had curfews; male students did not. Nightly room checks ensured these policies were complied with. Until the mid-1980s, a group of female students called the “Mountaineer Babes” were used to recruit prospective football players by shepherding them on campus tours.
By the mid-1970s, the broader women’s and gay liberation movements dovetailed with campus advocacy, and they were slowly eroding these patronizing conventions. Students founded a chapter of the Women’s Liberation Front in 1970, the National Organization of Women in 1975 and the Appalachian Gay Awareness Organization in 1979.
When the Women’s Studies committee began to meet, only about 25% of college faculty nationwide were female — and at coeducational institutions, they were usually fewer in number, inhabiting the lowest ranks and untenured or part-time.
The group at App State convened monthly in each other’s homes to formalize the study of women at the university. They had no office space or administrative support. Nonetheless, their course offerings grew over the next two years, and the interdisciplinary minor in Women’s Studies was approved in 1978.
This was not long after the first stand-alone Women’s Studies program in the country was founded in 1970. Women’s Studies at App State was part of this academic zeitgeist and the first Women’s Studies program in the UNC System.
Students and faculty sought to create new knowledge via women’s perspectives. They brought the feminist practice of “consciousness-raising” into classrooms, developing — and arguably, pioneering — the student-centered, discussion-based and community-engaged pedagogies that are valued across disciplines today.
Women’s Studies was necessary because it was uncommon for traditional academic units to incorporate the histories, experiences and intellectual contributions of women.
Gerda Lerner, one of the chief advocates for what became Women’s History Month, offered the first women’s history course in the country only in 1963 at a then-women’s college.
In 1971, literary critic Elaine Showalter reported that she “looked at all the syllabi for all the courses offered in the English Department of the women’s college I attended,” and they included “313 male writers” and just “seventeen women writers.”
Autonomous Women’s Studies programs offered another intellectual advantage: being unharnessed from traditional disciplines meant developing holistic, interdisciplinary, and democratized knowledge — fuller, richer knowledge — about gendered lives, histories, writing, cultural traditions and social and political issues. This is why it remains necessary today.
As the field grew — imperfectly, and not without serious challenges and sometimes painful reckonings — it began to encompass “gender” more broadly and relationally, focusing the social and cultural rituals that produced womanhood, manhood and dissident configurations of gender in relations of power — including race, nation, class, caste, sexuality and ability. In 2015, in a reflection of these changes, App State’s Women’s Studies program formally changed its name to “Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.”
Now there are approximately 809 programs focused on gender, women and sexuality in the U.S., and they report a growing interest in the field, with at least 50% of programs noting an increase in undergraduate course enrollment, according to a report by the National Women’s Studies Association.
App State’s GWS program, likewise, remains vibrant. Today’s faculty members are as devoted as those nearly 50 years ago. Since Fall 2023, the number of enrolled majors has more than doubled. The Triota Honor Society inducted 20 members in its first year on our campus.
GWS majors and minors inhabit key leadership positions at our university and do important work in our community. They have won prestigious fellowships and presented work at conferences. Alumni have satisfying careers in healthcare, social work, higher education, publishing, nonprofits and other fields.
Moreover, students in GWS continue to rise to the challenge of contemporary problems related to women, gender and sexuality, and their creative solutions will create meaningful change.