The Future of Women’s Studies in our Information Age
Bonnie G. Smith · Women s Studies · 2019
This chapter looks at the pros and cons for continuing Women’s Studies. It discusses some of the areas where Women’s Studies is still in its infancy and where dramatic break-throughs in thinking emerge. Social and political questions affecting the status of women form an important part of our debate, and we evaluate the place of women in the economy. A final post-feminist argument is that young adult women have had no road blocks to getting contraception or other reproductive counseling. Critics find much in post-feminism to dislike and call it valueless, producing commodity-driven lives. The evidence suggests that Women’s Studies has hardly begun to find answers to and remedy the burning questions of the inequality of the sexes and the life-crushing harm of sexism, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, transphobia, and other forms of hatred. Women’s Studies has led the way in considering now and in the future the meaning of post-humanism as it extends to women and beyond.