Recent scholarship has made it clear that full understanding of human behavior, culture, and society cannot be attained without investigating women’s experiences.  The Women’s Studies minor is an 18-hour interdisciplinary program designed to offer students such an opportunity.  It provides new ways of approaching conventional disciplines and opens up questions previously unexamined.

Our aim is two-fold: to stimulate and promote new scholarship in the area of Women’s Studies and to encourage traditional departments to broaden fields of study to include women’s issues. Attention paid to women’s perspectives has altered our understanding of historical change, social, economic, and political life, and the arts and sciences. In addition, Women’s Studies highlights the necessity of understanding important social divisions other than gender: those of race, economic status, sexual identity, and nationality. It provides key conceptual tools that students can use in educating themselves both in and out of college.

Courses listed below are offered on a regular basis; these, as well as special topics courses, may be taken for credit toward the minor with permission of the Women’s Studies Minor Coordinator. All Women’s Studies Minor students are required to submit a writing portfolio in the final semester of their senior year to the Women’s Studies Minor Coordinator. The portfolio should consist of papers from no fewer than three WST or gender-related courses, including one paper from WST 4309, Feminist Theory. Once they decide upon the minor, students should contact the Women’s Studies Minor Coordinator and declare the minor with their major advisor, as soon as possible. For more information about the Women’s Studies Minor, please e-mail: wsminor@eiu.edu.  Additional information about courses offered in the minor can be found on the Women’s Studies Minor homepage:  http://castle.eiu.edu/wsminor/minor.htm.