 Our Mission The Women's Studies Program aims to help students gain knowledge about the complex ways that gender ideas and practices shape the world around them. Gender affects the way in which we live our lives in a personal way---it affects families, children, reproduction, and the organization of work in the home---but it also affects the formation and limitations of every major social institution and cultural practice. Our goal is to help students see the ways in which gender is being thought about and practiced, as well as to help them develop their own analytical skills to evaluate, assess, and imagine differently.
Our objective is for our students to learn about gender with an intersectional and transnational approach. To study gender either in one's own society or in the world, one must come to understand how gender ideas and practices take shape in relationship with ideas and practices about race, class, cultural identity, sexuality, nationality, and religion. Gender hierarchies and sexual domination figure in nearly every culture and society, and categories like "traditional vs. modern," or "West vs. East," can over-simplify and distort the significant variations and differences that exist in the world. The possibility of understanding and solidarity among women worldwide can only be achieved by an analysis of gender and gender oppression that places both within a global and intersectional framework.
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