History
Duke has a long history of educating women, beginning in the 19th century. The University's commitment to female students was formalized in 1930 with the creation of The Woman's College. For 40 years, this coordinate college insured that women students had access to higher education. Ruth Hazen-Smith, the assistant dean for instruction, introduced a course called Women for the New Age, which she taught until her retirement in the 1950s and in 1968 an interdisciplinary course on Women in American society was introduced. In 1972, the Woman's College merged with Trinity, the men's college. Throughout the 1970s, attention to questions of women and gender was sporadic. Women's Studies at Duke was created in 1983 under the leadership of Dean Ernestine Friedl, then Dean of Trinity College, to bring scholarship on women into the curriculum, making gender issues the subject of teaching and research.

Women's Studies began with a single desk in the corner of 119 East Duke, known informally as the blue parlor, with Jean O'Barr as director. A year later Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society came to Duke and Jean O'Barr served as editor, coordinating a group of scholars from Duke, UNC-CH, and other area schools as the advisory board. Graduate courses began in 1987, and the undergraduate major was established in 1994. Duke University now has an internationally recognized faculty of feminist scholars, and its library resources support scholarship for visitors from around the globe.

In March of 1998, alumna Margaret Taylor Smith, leaving her position as the chair of the Kresge Foundation, directed her retirement gift to Women's Studies; she and her husband Sidney matched it with a family gift; Council members, members of the class of 1997, and staff contributed; and the Duke Endowment granted $100,000 to complete the million dollars for an endowed faculty chair. Jean O'Barr was named the first Margaret Taylor Smith Director, believed to be the nation's first endowed director's chair in Women's Studies. Robyn Wiegman held the position from Fall 2001 until Spring 2007 and Ranjana Khanna is the current director.

As of 1994, undergraduate students can either major or minor in Women's Studies. Including undergraduate majors and minors and graduate certificate students, Women's Studies is Duke's largest interdisciplinary program. More than 75 Duke faculty members affiliate with Women's Studies, and there is a large and energetic body of alumni/ae supporters.


Mission Statement
The Program in Women's Studies at Duke University is dedicated to exploring gender identities, relations, practices, theories and institutions, In the field's first decades, feminist scholarship reoriented traditional disciplines toward the study of women and gender and developed new methodologies and critical vocabularies that have made interdisciplinarity a key feature of Women's Studies as an autonomous field. Today, scholars continue to explore the meaning and impact of identity as a primary though by no means transhistorical or universal way of organizing social life by pursuing an intersectional analysis of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality. In the classroom, as in our research, our goal is to transform the university's organization of knowledge by reaching across the epistemological and methodological divisions of historical, political, philosophical, economic, representational, technological and scientific analysis. In our Program's dual emphasis on interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, we offer students new knowledge while equipping them with a wide range of analytical and methodological skills.

Many students identify women's studies courses as among the most exciting and enlightening they take at Duke. The women and men who enroll in our classes each semester gain the opportunity to understand how social, historical, and psychological forces, organized by the central concept of gender, shape them as individuals; attain a fuller understanding of human behavior, culture, and society made possible by investigating women's lives; acquaint themselves with the experience of women of different economic classes, sexual orientations, and cultural, and racial backgrounds; and transfer the critical and analytical skills they acquire in the study of gender and society to other classes, beyond the campus to other activities, and eventually to their professional careers.

Women's Studies has, since its inception, been an interdisciplinary field. It has consistently assessed the strengths and challenges of such interdisciplinarity. Duke students find their background in Women's Studies to be a valuable resource for their professional development and lifelong intellectual growth. In recent years, Women's Studies graduates have found themselves well prepared to pursue advanced degrees in every discipline; training in the legal and medical professions; employment in community service agencies; leadership roles in local, state, and national government; artistic expression in the creative arts; and positions in the corporate world.