Integrating Women's Studies in a Political Science Curriculum

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Integrating Women's Studies with any curriculum, political science or otherwise, is a formidable task. And like most changes in curriculum, the integration of Women's Studies material has not come about in orderly fashion. There are some dimensions to Women's Studies integration, however, that set it apart from other curriculum change.

The thrust of Women's Studies vis a vis any discipline is to revise and reinterpret that discipline from a feminist perspective. Feminist philosophy has argued that traditional methodologies, theories, and manifest analyses have contained a patriarchal bias which has excluded the impact of women from the intellectual evolution of humankind. Thus, on the discipline and on the academy itself, the very premise of Women's Studies makes demands which are far-reaching and threatening to establishment doctrine.