Death of Academic Feminism: Women’s Studies Canned in UK

Beginning this summer British universities will no longer offer an undergraduate degree in women’s studies.

Critics argue the reason was dwindling interest with students finding the subject of feminism and the struggle for equality, “predictable, tiresome and dreary” while others claim it was the universities fault for under promoting the studies program and students who preferred to pay tuition for courses which actually helped them obtain a degree in the job market.

“[Taking] women’s studies as a separate course may not feel as relevant to women who go to university to help them enter the job market,” said Jean Edelstein, an author and journalist. “As the feminist movement has become increasingly associated with extreme thoughts, women who may have previously been interested in women’s studies may be deterred by these overtones.”

Women’s studies first came onto the scene in 1970 at San Diego State College and eventually spread to other campuses across the United States and United Kingdom. Mary Evans, a visiting fellow at the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics, said the universities decision to end the undergraduate degree for women’s studies doesn’t “signal the end of an era: feminist ideas and literature are as lively as ever, but the institutional framework in which they are taught has changed”.

Christina Hoff Summers, author of “Who Stole Feminism” feels feminist scholarship is guilty of living off the past:

“Feminist scholarship has become predictable, tiresome and dreary, and most young women avoid it like the plague,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for public policy research in Washington and author of Who Stole Feminism? “British and American societies are no longer patriarchal and oppressive ‘male hegemonies’. But most women’s studies departments are predicated on the assumption that women in the West are under siege. What nonsense.”

The first courses in women’s studies were introduced in late 1960′s and yet it’s a few decades later that the Brit Universities are doing away with the undergraduate degree. Why would something that is supposed to be so important to women, women’s studies, become “boring, tiresome and dreary” in such a short time span?

I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist. ~Sally Kempton

Perhaps one reason for the loss of interest in feminism and women’s studies is the strikingly odd silence from organizations such as NOW, National Organization of Women, against the very real and barbaric practice of FGM, or Female Genital Mutilation, on little girls across the globe whose parents follow the strictest tenets of the Islamic faith.

Female genital mutilation comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

Between 100 and 140 million girls and women in the world are estimated to have undergone such procedures, and 3 million girls are estimated to be at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation every year. Female genital mutilation has been documented in 28 countries in Africa and in several countries in Asia and the Middle East.

Some forms of the practice have also been reported from other countries, including among certain ethnic groups in Central and South America. There is also evidence of increasing numbers of girls and women living outside their place of origin, including in North America and western Europe, who have undergone or may be at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation.

Tammy Bruce writes of the failure of NOW to speak out or make any type of statement when a British schoolteacher in Sudan was arrested and tried for allowing her 7-year-old students to name a teddy bear, Muhammad.

NOW also declined to speak up or out or against the Saudi government when it arrested a young rape victim and sentenced her to 200 lashes and prison time for being in the company of a male not her father or brothers.

When I searched Smeal’s Feminist Majority website to get a statement about either situation, I found none. The Smeal site has a brief newswire story about the Saudi rape victim, but no position statement or condemnation. They have absolutely nothing posted about the Gibbons situation. A search of the NOW site reveals nothing posted about either outrage.

This wholesale abandonment of women by the American so-called feminist leadership on an issue that transcends party politics perfectly illustrates how vapid, and even malevolent, they have become. Where is Eleanor Smeal? Gloria Steinem? Kim Gandy of NOW has proven where she is — with the rest of her cohorts hiding behind the NOW couch, save she would be required to take a position that might “offend” Islamists. (Tammy Bruce)

Bruce is spot-on. She writes that today’s feminists are vapid, which is true. Where are the feminists when it comes to the issues that affect millions of women across the globe, issues that are more than just rising above a “glass ceiling” in the white collar work force? Issues which force them to address the one religion that teaches its followers to remove the female genitals of its little girls, which teaches its women are less than second class citizens?

Most women are one man away from welfare. ~Gloria Steinem

Why this total disconnect between white women’s rights and those of other ethnicities, such as the Muslim women throughout the world?

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual. ~Gloria Steinem

The fact that so few people are now interested in obtaining a degree in women’s studies in Britain points out that feminists have become relics in an amazing short amount of time due to their own unresponsiveness to real world issues that face women.

The final class to graduate with a degree in women’s studies is this spring with just 12 students.

By LBG

Image – Women’s Lib
Source – Fox News – Teddy Bear Case Exposes Failure of American Feminist Issues
Source – Feminist Quotes
Source – Wiki – Women’s Studies
Source – Independent – Farewell to ‘predictable, tiresome and dreary’ women’s studies

Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page

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