About
The Women’s Studies minor is open to students of any major.
The program offers flexible and diverse coursework within the School of Multidisciplinary Social Sciences and Humanities, including Feminist Theory, colloquia, and constantly refreshed Special Topics courses. Through this coursework, the program taps in to the distinct scholarship of Women’s Studies across fields and disciplines.
Why Women's Studies?
Women’s Studies is its own unique and distinct program of study; it serves as a nexus where literally hundreds of vital interests converge any given minute. It opens eyes and minds.
Practically, it provides grounding both broad and deep, grounding in the sense of “getting real,” thinking critically, solving actual problems, seeking unsought data, collecting and preserving archives of information forgotten, neglected, minimized and new, examining/analyzing data in fresh ways—meaningful ways, developing and enhancing skill sets—like speaking, writing, leading, teamwork.
Women’s studies is an asset to every field that reckons with the complexity of our species—gender, of course, but not only gender. Women’s Studies offers its students tools to offset the chronic misunderstandings, myths and ignorance channeled into law, policy and practice. We shine a light on conditions of women across cultures, societies, identities—across time, space and situations, circumstances. We illuminate gender dynamics, a history of strategies for struggle against inequality, injustice, misogyny, lazy indifference.
Women’s Studies as a field is a study in and of itself: a study of trial and error and perseverance. A study of devotion, organization, achievement and vital contribution to our past and present. Women’s Studies at Kent State plays one small but important bit part in this worldwide area of study. Without women’s studies, we’d know precious little of the consequences of women’s subordination, the heavy burden of gender-based assumptions, the overt and covert biases that preempt women’s opportunities, nip them in the bud.
Women’s Studies is training for social change agents, for empathic, tuned-in scholars, for humans whose credos and codes simply call them to see more clearly, understand more rightly, judge more fairly—with purpose, purpose they can articulate.
Many of our students choose to study Women’s Studies because they genuinely enjoy the subject. Period.
Women’s Studies is hard at work, crafting internships, volunteer experiences, opportunities to create and study whether independently or with mentors—always in good company.
Women’s Studies minors make excellent candidates for graduate school. Their specific interests help set them apart from other students; their close work with the faculty and administrators in our Women’s Studies community afford them a pool of informed, caring individuals available not only for guidance and support but for references, recommendations and cool connections.