Dear Gender and Women’s Studies Community,
It is a profoundly challenging and demoralizing moment as the Gender and Women’s Studies community, and the values we affirm, are under attack. But our community is wide and deep. Let us stand together at this difficult time.
While 2025 has started off as a wildly challenging year, 2025 is also the 50th anniversary of Gender and Women’s studies on the UW-Madison campus. The importance and the impact of the GWS classroom, scholarship, and community have never been more explicit.
The mission of our department at UW-Madison and the purpose of gender studies departments in the academy more broadly is clear: we provide an institutional home and an intellectual community to develop and disseminate knowledge about how gender shapes people’s lives including the lives of women (cis and trans), men (cis and trans), nonbinary & two spirit people, and people with other gender-expansive identities, through analysis of texts, social and cultural practices, and social institutions, both local and global, historical and contemporary. We examine the structures of inequality and movements for social change, especially attuned to the intersections of gender and gender diversity with other dimensions of difference and inequality such as race, class, sexuality, disability, religion, and national origin.
We cannot take our institutional home for granted. It emerged, piece by piece, more than fifty years ago as instructors and students came together on college campuses demanding access to academic careers and equitable salaries, physical and intellectual resources, and knowledge about women’s lives and experiences. In the fall of 1975, after years of organizing and protesting, Women’s Studies was founded at UW-Madison. This institutional foundation for the intersectional study of women, gender, and sexuality, was created with righteous anger and the profound optimism (or at least hope) that by working together, people could create a better, more just, world. Over the last fifty years, this community of scholars and students, here and across the country, has shaped our understanding of gender and sexuality.
As we look back with appreciation at the generations of feminist activists who founded and nurtured our field and our department, we refuse to turn our backs on this legacy. We will not abandon our ideals and our mission. We face the future determined to provide pathbreaking research and inspiring teaching to another generation of passionate students.
You can help. If not now, when?
- Help GWS amplify the value of our community and our classes as we celebrate our 50th year. Drop us a note at alumni@gws.wisc.edu sharing how our department has made a difference in your life–personally, professionally, intellectually, or otherwise.
- Connect directly with other GWS alums via our grassroots network.
- Donate to the department! Day of the Badger is right around the corner. Mark your calendar to give to GWS during the campaign on April 8th and 9th – or consider sponsoring a matching grant.
We know the GWS community is one of our greatest assets. We also know that we are stronger together in times of challenge and difficulty. Please join our efforts to ensure another 50 years.
Judith Houck
Chair, Gender and Women’s Studies