"It's really interdisciplinary and pretty receptive to the kind of academic plans you have," says Ryono.

Concentrators are required to take three introductory courses: Women's Studies 10a, a history course; 10b, which focuses on literary and cultural criticism; and 10c, a social science course.

Students must also take a course listed under women's studies outside their principal area of focus. That is, a student focusing on the social sciences must take a women's studies course in the humanities or natural sciences.

Mansfield also expresses concern that women's studies differs from other concentrations focused on minority groups because "women are not a community. They live with men."

He complains that the concentration is grounded in politics.

"I don't think it provides for intellectual development," says Mansfield. "What it makes is biased idealogues."

Concentrators say there are still misconceptions about the program, and not everyone takes women's studies seriously.

"I think SOME (extremely wise) people take the department seriously," one student says in an e-mail message. "But I do not think the department is taken as seriously as it should be, or by as many as it should. People have archaic notions of feminism such as 'lesbian-butch-male-bashing-etc.' which they also apply to 'women's studies.'''

On the contrary, Phillips Professor of Early American History and Professor of Women's Studies Laurel Thatcher Ulrich says women's studies programs, such as the one at Harvard, have led to a flowering of a long-neglected aspect of academics.

She notes that when she was in college majoring in English, the only women writers she read were Willa Cather and Emily Dickenson.

"The writers who now fill the syllabi of American literature courses were dismissed, if they were mentioned at all, as the 'damned scribbling females'..." Thatcher Ulrich says in an e-mail message. "Women's studies programs and women's studies methods within older disciplines have helped to create a kind of renaissance of scholarship...one that will have improtant and lasting effects for generations."

The Advent of Women's Studies

The University established a Committee on Women's Studies in 1978. The committee sponsored various colloquia and an annual Women's History Week and listed gender-related classes in a separate section of the course catalog but could not grant degrees.

"[The committee] had very little visibility on campus," says Professor of Romance Languages and Compartive Literature Susan R. Suleiman, acting chair of the women's studies committee. "I was chair of the committee in 1984, and at that point we decided that we would make a big effort to both bring a visibility on campus and create a committee on degees."

It was not a smooth road.