Women's Studies Department records

The Women's Studies Department at The George Washington University (GW) is responsible for several degrees for undergraduates, masters, and dual degrees.

Founded in 1972, GW Women's Studies Program offered the first interdisciplinary M.A. degree in Women's Studies in the United States. This program grew from a highly successful Continuing Education for Women (CEW) project founded in 1965 and led by Professor Ruth Osborn. These CEW students, many of them college graduates influenced by the Women's Movement, wanted graduate work that would enable them to help other women. With demonstrated student demand, Dr. Osborn persuaded the administration to approve an interdisciplinary M.A. degree comparable to other Special Studies M.A. degrees in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The first Women's Studies Master's Degree students entered the program in the 1973-1974 academic year.

In 1977, the GW Women's Studies Program took another groundbreaking step: the development of a public policy focus with the hiring of Dr. Virginia Allan, Chair of the 1969 Task Force on Women's Rights and Responsibilities, appointed by President Nixon and a retiring State Department official, joined by Dr. Phyllis Palmer, an American women's historian, and Charlotte Conable, a Women's Studies alumna. The public policy curriculum stressed a grounding in feminist theory, and encouraged student internships and related research projects as the degree's culmination. It trained graduates to change the social policies that constrained women's lives. Since 1982, the GW Women's Studies Program has offered two M.A. degrees sharing the same Women's Studies core courses, the M.A. in Public Policy with a Concentration in Women's Studies, and the M.A. in Women's Studies with a liberal arts concentration.

Recent innovations at the graduate level include the establishment of a field in Gender and Social Policy within the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Public Policy in 1997, and then, a year later, a Ph.D. in Human Sciences with an M.A. in Women's Studies. In May 1997, the George Washington University Public Policy and Women's Studies programs joined in affiliation with the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), an independent, non-profit research organization.

In 2000, the department added several joint degrees between the Law School and Women's Studies, making this department one of two programs nationwide to offers such degrees.

At the undergraduate level, a Women's Studies Minor was inaugurated in 1989 and a major as well as two 5 year M.A./B.A. programs were added in 2000.

N.B. This history note was written in 2005.