Book Review

Women's studies, a thirty-year-old academic curricular innovation, has finally "arrived." It has a history, as Marilyn Jacoby Boxer amply demonstrates in this study, the first scholarly and comprehensive account of the development of the field. Boxer offers an enlightening examination of the political, social, intellectual, and cultural debates that initiated and informed the institutionalization of women's studies scholarship and programs in American higher education. She articulates the close connections among feminist and other political movements, women's and minorities' increasing participation in higher education from the late 1950s, and other political and educational forces that enabled women's studies, African American studies, and Native American studies to gain a foothold on college campuses in the United States. And she does this from the perspective of a participant, which offers her account an appropriate level of optimism, a familiarity with the discussions in the field from its inception, and a clear understanding of the many voices that have shaped its transformations over time. Such intimacy with one's topic could be counterproductive for reconstructing a usable and intellectually responsible history, but that is not the case here. Boxer exhibits a deep commitment to solid, well-researched scholarship, using the experience of her struggles to finish college and graduate school while raising children on her own and her career as a teacher and higher education administrator to lend both weight and perspective to her historical interpretation of "one of the great intellectual movements of our century."

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