Women’s Studies and Its Discontents: I think, therefore I am dangerous—A feminist button

In the spring of 1995, I taught an undergraduate class in women’s studies at Rutgers University, a large public university. All of the students, even the “nontraditional” ones, were younger than I. I felt a fine affection for my students: the political science major who wanted to become a record producer; the white woman who galvanized the class with her descriptions of being on welfare as a single mom; the African-American student, the first in her family to attend college, whose mother and aunt had protected her while she was growing up in a tough urban neighborhood; the out lesbian who drove a Jeep and insisted on spelling women “womyn.”

The class taught me about the current stage of women’s ...