Women's Studies Minor

Using an interdisciplinary gendered perspective, the minor in Women’s Studies helps students study feminist scholarship and methodology as well as develop skills to engage in feminist activism.

The Women's Studies minor introduces students to the study of women and their experiences from an interdisciplinary, critical, women-centered perspective. Theoretical developments in feminist scholarship and methodology will be addressed and the relevance of theory for feminist activism will be investigated. This specialization will support students who intend to pursue women's studies in graduate school. Students must choose courses from at least two disciplines.

Featured Courses

CWGST 5001 Women, Men and Work

This course explores issues related to women and men and work from colonial to contemporary America including relationships of work to ethnicity, class, economic change, political, and social conditions.

CWGST 5014 Images of Hispanic Women

This course focuses on the impact and consequences of being female and Hispanic, both in the United States as well as in the Caribbean and Central/South American continent. It examines women's changing role from an interdisciplinary perspective, as well as the influence of class, race, and socioeconomic status on the generalized images of Hispanic women in the United States.

CWGST 5019 Feminist Theory

The course examines women’s lives and relationships from both structural and personal perspectives. We consider the interplay of race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and other elements of cultural identity and power in the experience of women, in all its variety. We examine both oppression and the positive responses women have developed to empower themselves. Students explore personal and systematic relationship between and across cultural groups. Student projects synthesize academic and social action components.

CWGST 5330 Women and Spirituality

This course analyzes contemporary and historical patterns, images, myths, and practices that women draw on to express that which is sacred to them. Students examine the diversity of women’s sociocultural relationships with religion and personal and political dimensions of what they understand as “spirituality,” whether practiced individually or communally.

CWGST 6005 Intersections of Women, Race and Religion

In this course students analyze ways in which the spiritual and racial identities of women shape their responses to racism. They study their own cultural identity, read and discuss a range of writing about gender, and race, and use historical and contemporary examples to test their ideas and concepts.

CWGST 6043 Perspectives on Women and Gender Studies

This course explores the feminist past, present and future by providing an overview of feminism in the United States in the 20th century. We discuss the historical and social construction of identities; we contextualize current feminism within our current globalized economy; and we examine gender within specific topics such as the body and health, religion and pop culture.