Interestingly, men's studies are not entirely incompatible with the study of women -- but only of some women, viewed within a predominantly male context, and seen from a male perspective. Within the worldview of men's studies, women can be, at most, only the objects of study, just one more among many possible classes of entities to be examined. No reference is made to the experience of women, to how the world is looked at, felt, and thought about by women. Instead, when they are discussed at all, women are seen as individuals, often as exceptional individuals, who have little in common by virtue of being female. Examinations of and references to women thus become a sort of addendum to existing disciplines.

In my own educational background there were many examples of this approach to the study of women: in a course on American literature, for instance, Emily Dickinson was the one female writer we studied. We referred to her as "Miss Dickinson", and analyzed her poetry in total isolation from the women-centered context of her writing. In psychology, we took note of the fact that women's motive to achieve seemed notably different from that of men; no one knew why, since the sex differences in motivation usually resulted in women's being dropped from the studies. My history textbook contained "suffragettes", who chained themselves to fences to obtain the vote; but no one thought it odd that women had so recently, even grudgingly, been granted the right to minimal political participation. And in science--well, in science there were no women, as far as I could tell, except perhaps Marie Curie -- always referred to as Madame Curie, to mark her association with her husband. But in any case, the absence of women did not matter, I learned, since science is value free: it doesn't matter who collects the facts, as long as facts are collected.

By contrast with men's studies, women's studies are most certainly not the dominant contemporary intellectual paradigm. Nor do they consist merely of the ad hoc addition of women to the curriculum and to the scholarly agenda. What, then, are women's studies? Are they not about women? Well, yes and no. Yes, women's studies are about women: about putting women, our lives, feelings, values, creations, and ideas at the very centre of our academic focus. In fact, so important is this focus on women that many of us feel that women's studies are, or ought to be, a distinct academic discipline within the university. But no, women's studies are not about women in the way that men's studies sometimes include women. That is, they do I not just examine women as isolated, exceptional individuals who happen -- through good fortune, male sponsorship, true grit, or all three -- to have been deemed worthy of notice by male scholars and teachers. And above all, they do not study women from a supposedly objective, value-free, neutral standpoint. Instead, women's studies permit women students and teachers to see that "them is us": that when we talk, read, or research about women, we are talking, reading, and researching about ourselves.

The now-classic example of this focus on women's experience is the work of Carol Gilligan, who saw that Lawrence Kohlberg's studies on human moral development virtually excluded women's intuitions and feelings about ethics. She felt that women's moral development and perspective are different from those of men, and are worth studying in their own right.

Another example of putting women's experience front and centre in women's studies is the creation of entire courses on literature by and about women. In history we no longer assume that throughout the sweep of our human past women were doing nothing, or were just tending the fire and minding the children. We look at the wonderful variety of women's work, both past and present: at home, in agriculture, in industry, in the arts. And we also recognize that minding the children is itself an enormously creative and valuable activity. In science, we seek to challenge the values on which the scientific enterprise has been founded, and to reevaluate the norms that inform scientific research and writing. Women's studies also revolutionize our examination of culture and communication. We become aware of the special forms -- quilting, needlework, and pottery, for example -- that women's artistic expression has taken throughout the centuries. And all of the media -- film, television, popular music, advertising, printed works -- reveal in the images they convey both misogynist biases and some promise for reform.