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Our graduates work for organizations like:
- The Abused Women's Advocacy Project
- People's Regional Opportunity Program
- Volunteers of America
- Planned Parenthood
- Maine Department of Health and Human Services
- York County Shelter Programs
- Healthy Maine Partnership
- National Association of Social Workers
- Goodwill Industries
- Maine Women's Lobby & Policy Center
and enter graduate school in the fields of:
- American and New England Studies
- Digital Arts
- Law
- Literacy
- Media Studies
- Social Work
- Sociology
- Teaching
Click
here to find out what USM Women and Gender Studies Graduates
are doing!
***
Alice
Ginsberg, BA CAS '86 reflects upon her decision to pursue
a degree in what many advised was a useless discipline.
Back
in the early 1980's I decided to pursue a major in women's
studies, contrary to every piece of advice I had ever
received. Do something profitable I was told-- study
business or law. Do something scholarly I was told--
study English or philosophy. Do something creative I
was told-- study theater or writing. In fact, I was
doing all of that, and much more. But women's studies
at that time was not a well-known field, and it was
not unusual to be asked whether I was, in fact, studying
home economics. Others who were more familiar with women's
studies and with feminism criticized the field for being
too political, too biased, too flaky, too undeveloped.
Regardless of whether or not they understood or approved
of my major, however, there was one question asked:
"But what are you going to do with it?"
My
suspicion is that it is still being asked of many women's
studies students today and I suspect they are no less
frightened about their prospects than I was. So I want
to answer the question here and now, publicly, as best
I can.
To
ask "What are you going to do with it?" implies
that education is a passive process. It implies that
we learn and then we do. But in many ways the very nature
of women's studies, which grew out of and alongside
the women's liberation movement, is attractive because
it is already active. Women's studies was born out of
the political realities of women's lives. Women's studies
was born not just out of the desire to learn, but the
necessity to learn; not so much out of literature, as
out of illiteracy, not so much out of economics as out
of poverty.
Women's
studies brings together many different disciplines.
It asks questions that one discipline may not adequately
answer by itself. For example, English is solely concerned
with what has already been written. Women's studies
also asks questions about what was never written-- and
why.
And
when does English stop being English and become history,
anthropology or folklore?
Just
as feminist theory stresses that the personal is political,
women's studies stresses that our theories should be
grounded in actions. In women's studies classes we questioned
the way we did research (do statistics tell the whole
story?); whether our writing, often overly scholarly,
was accessible to the people it was meant to reach;
whether we were ignoring the experiences of other cultures;
and we questioned our own racism (sometimes the most
painful questioning of all). Most memorably, we went
beyond the walls of the classrooms and of our textbooks,
out into the communities around us, sometimes literally
and sometimes through the stories we told each other
about our diverse lives.
In
the five years since I have graduated from Temple I
have worked as a coordinator of a Jewish studies program,
as an editorial assistant for several books and films
by and about women, as a teaching assistant for an experimental
women's studies program in Europe, and as an administrator
of a non-profit community news service. Currently, as
a program officer at the Pennsylvania Humanities Council,
I am working on a statewide initiative to expand public
women's studies programs in Pennsylvania.
It's
true that there are not many want ads that start out
with "women's studies major wanted." But what
my women's studies taught me was that questioning can
sometimes be far more valuable than answers.
I
learned to look at a problem from many different perspectives
knowing that there didn't always have to be a right
or wrong way to approach something. I learned the value
of working cooperatively, that everybody has a voice,
and should be given an opportunity to use it. I learned
that my experience as a white, middle-class woman was
not at the center of history and that history itself
needed to be rewritten to include other cultures, races
and ethnicities. I learned that theory and practice
should go hand in hand. I learned that education should
be about change and evolution, and not about reiterating
what is already known. I take that knowledge with me
to each job and do with it-- whatever I can.
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