Signs and the Geopolitics of Education in the United States

Abstract

Accounts of academic feminism’s past that situate its emergence largely in relation to the new social movements of the 1960s overlook crucial changes that the Cold War produced in higher education. For any historian of feminist scholarship, these changes are noteworthy because they profoundly circumscribed how and to what extent social movements could succeed in modifying already-existing institutional, administrative, programmatic, departmental, and scholarly practices. The remainder of this book examines how a crucial facet of academic feminism was shaped by a more complex web of forces than those instigated by the women’s movement. Indeed, academic feminism’s emergence in the United States cannot be properly understood without a broader appreciation of the changes in higher education that took place during the Cold War era. Academic feminism emerged in the context of the Cold War; accounts of the field’s past that disregard this context of emergence are invariably incomplete.

Are there any other special Signs projects that will improve our budget and our souls? We need suggestions.

—Margery Wolf¹

It is a pleasure to get such cooperation from the government!

—Catharine Stimpson²