Feminism

From the social action of the women's movement in the United States there emerged research consciously done within a feminist context, analyzing gender issues embedded in the most familiar facets of life—family, relationships, work, education, religion, media. Thus began women's studies, in which women became "subjects" rather than "objects" of study. Women's studies centers and departments drawing scholars from disparate academic disciplines became institutionalized in the U.S. academy in the 1970s. The National Women's Studies Association (1977) and the Feminist Press (1970) were committed to the production of feminist texts in order to create a body of knowledge that could be used to teach women's studies as an academic discipline.

As feminist scholars researched and questioned women's invisibility in history and psychology, "scientific" constructions of women in medical discourses, and popular images in literature, art, and religion, there emerged feminist theory, which sought to uncover the gender bias in the production of academic knowledge. Researchers challenged the tools of analysis used in sociology, history, psychology, and economics to argue that conceptualizations excluded women and that the disciplinary models used silenced women's voices. They argued that a "method of feminist inquiry" in an academic discipline did not necessarily involve alternative methods but rather a focus on alternative origins of problematics, explanatory hypotheses, and evidence and a new prescription for the appropriate relationship between the inquirer and her or his subject of inquiry. Feminist theorizing, in its project of writing women into theory and law, thus became a strategy of resistance. Feminist scholars drew from a range of ideologies to challenge existing disciplinary paradigms.