Future Career and Personal Goals
Generally, the responses students gave to questions about the influence of women's studies on their career plans were optimistic. They wished to work with other women for social change through teaching, working with women and the law, and through guidance and counseling. One student expressed her desire in her deep admiration for other women: "I'd like to work more with women because I think they need to believe that they have so much to offer. They're so valuable. They're so strong. Because they're so great. Women I've known for years who've lived through situations that I could never have coped with and who are still kind, loving, strong, good women and a lot of them don't realize how strong they've been."

Their personal lives had also undergone changes ranging from being conscious of gender roles to speaking up for women under all circumstances. They emphasized that women's studies course had validated their lives, and that "getting into feminist theory," as one student described it, "touched me as a woman, spoke to me as a women ... and to my experiences."

Other students talked about life changes in terms of gaining self-confidence and empowerment, and one emphasized how she felt "settled and balanced" by the knowledge she had gained in her program. Another stressed how she was learning to be happier with herself as she is, and "to learn through the wisdom that women have."

Conclusion
There is no doubt that attendance in the women's studies program's at the two universities studied brought about changes in these students' thinking. The program's gave them not only a woman's way of knowing but a greater knowledge of women that is missing from the traditional curriculum. Transformations that these students underwent included a wider knowledge of themselves and of society at large that connected them to themselves as women and to other women. "Women's Studies" said one student, "is women's lives." Another student found a distinct metaphor to describe her experience: "After I got into the courses I just sort of thought about it as looking at a jewel and turning it and looking at the facets, and you could just keep turning it and turning it."

I wish to emphasize that my research gave me hope. In working on my thesis and, in particular, in interviewing the respondents, I felt again the original joy of my earlier feminist work. It is a fact that, as women together, and through a program that stresses the unearthing of our past and linking it to our present, we can truly work for positive change in our society. We do have a herstory, and as feminist students and scholars we are making it a reality in the university environment.

Judith Grant is presently a part-time instructor in Sociology and Women's Studies for the University of New Brunswick and the University of Moncton. This article was excerpted from her M.A. thesis Finding Our Voice, Transforming Our World: A Study of the Experiences of Students Enrolled in Women's Studies at Two Maritime Universities, written for her degree of Sociology in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1991.