A Better Way to Teach Gender Studies

By LuElla D’Amico

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

At the end of my Women’s Writing course this semester, I assigned a novel that I could tell unnerved some of my students. In The Awakening of Miss Prim, a group of women—members of the San Ireneo Feminist League—meet weekly to discuss the concerns of their community. At one such meeting, they consider how best to find a husband for their newest member, Miss Prim.

 

“You call yourselves feminists?” the heroine exclaims, appalled. “Surely you don’t believe a woman should depend on a man!”

 

Many of my students found themselves inclined to agree with her. How could a “feminist league” be in the business of finding one of its members a husband? What kind of novel was I asking them to read—and in a women’s and gender studies class, no less?

 

For many conservative readers, the debate Miss Prim stages about marriage and female independence will not be entirely unfamiliar. Elsewhere in The Dispatch, contributing writer and Catholic feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant has observed that “women face pressure not just to limit the ways they are touched by the needs of others but also to contain the ways women are marked by and vulnerable to change and variation.” Miss Prim herself cannot fathom why marriage might make her life better. It is, in her view, for women comfortable with “compromise” or “accommodation.” My students, all women in this particular class, recognized that instinct immediately. Young women today are far more often told to prioritize self-care over dependence, and autonomy over attachment. To need others is to risk diminishment of self.

 

Still, Miss Prim gradually comes to embrace a more traditional Christian vision of community and family. She falls in love with her employer, the “Man in the Wing Chair,” and the novel traces her transformation with an almost too-neat clarity of trajectory. At times, the story feels more allegorical than realistic. “Modern women” like Miss Prim are described as “hard,” and as “need[ing] … to prove [their] worth … to ensure that [they] can have it all.”

 

Now, I find much to admire in the novel’s broader vision: the suggestion that beauty and fulfillment are often discovered not through endless self-construction, but through relationship and love. Still, women’s lives, as I encounter them in my classroom and beyond, rarely move along such a straightforward arc. (Mine certainly has not!) But much of the debate surrounding women’s and gender studies today still asks us to choose between precisely these kinds of narratives—as though the question were not how to live well within tension, but which side of it to occupy.

 

***

 

First: What is women’s and gender studies? (I realize that, for some readers, that question alone may be enough to prompt an early exit from this essay. But, please, stay with me.)

 

At its core, women’s and gender studies asks how societies influence our understanding of masculinity and femininity—and how those ideas are formed, reinforced, and rewarded over time. It traces the ways these dynamics show up in ordinary life: in the workplace, in literature, in media, in politics, in religion, and in the family. Moreover—as some of you may have heard—many contemporary women’s and gender studies programs also engage heavily with queer theory and debates about gender as socially constructed or “performed”—theoretical frameworks that often sit at the center of conservative critiques of the discipline.

 

Many of these departments that began during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s as “women’s studies” programs have since evolved alongside broader academic debates about identity, sexuality, embodiment, and power. To illustrate this, take a quick look at Yale University’s current Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offerings, which include courses such as “Latine Queer Trans Studies,” “Gender and Transgender,” “Technology, Race and Gender,” and “Feminist and Queer Theory.” These subjects are informed quite heavily by postmodern and intersectional frameworks (which explore how categories like sex, race, class, and sexuality overlap in lived experience), and it is often this frame of study that most often defines public perceptions of the discipline today, both good and bad.

 

These developments are real, and they have undeniably recalibrated the field. But they are not the whole of it by any means. Women’s and gender studies has not abandoned the study of women; the made-for-TV version of women’s and gender studies presented in political debates is not usually what’s happening in the typical classroom. For every program like Yale’s, there are others at smaller institutions—such as Benedictine University, a Catholic institution like the one where I teach—that offer courses such as “Great Women Theologians” and “Marriage and the Family” alongside more contemporary theoretical work. And, yes, you can study many topics like female theologians, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, labor, law, and family life in isolation. But without a setting that brings them into relation—one that asks, explicitly, how women and men encounter one another and how gender informs ordinary life—we lose something important. We lose the ability to see how these forces intersect—and, just as importantly, to ask what they mean. And if you’re a human being reading this, they have affected your life in some way, whether you’ve chosen to study them or not.

 

Of course, not everyone agrees that these questions deserve sustained academic attention in the first place. Some critics argue that gender differences in the workplace matter less than individual merit, while others—particularly within more traditional or religious frameworks—question whether women ought to be a major part of the workforce at all. But precisely because these debates remain unresolved, they require serious engagement rather than dismissal. How, for instance, do we have meaningful conversations about women in the workplace if no one is examining the factors that affect those experiences? After all, I can tell you from firsthand experience that having children while on the tenure track—years that line up, rather inconveniently, with many women’s most fertile years—is not easy, a scheduling coincidence no one seems to have thought through particularly well. I suspect the tweed-suited male academic of a bygone era was largely unbothered by this arrangement. The data are telling: While roughly 70 percent of male professors who achieve tenure are married with children, only about 44 percent of women who reach the same point are.

 

And the differences do not end there. Men with families reportedly often benefit from a “fatherhood premium”; they are often seen as more stable, more committed, as well as more deserving of promotion and higher pay. Women, by contrast, are just as often viewed as distracted or less competent, their caregiving responsibilities counted against them, and suffering from what is termed a “motherhood penalty.”

 

The same life event—a child being born—carries different professional meanings depending on whether you are a man or a woman. Without examining these dynamics directly, it becomes all too easy to treat their disparate outcomes as natural, or inevitable, rather than as something affected by expectations we might question. This is, of course, only one example. But it points to a larger need. Women’s and gender studies brings multiple disciplines into dialogue to examine what might need to change, not only in workplaces but in other purviews where men’s and women’s lives are different. For instance, should workplaces be structured around the assumption that caregiving responsibilities fall primarily on women, or should institutions better accommodate the realities of family life for both men and women? Questions involving workplace expectations, caregiving norms, educational systems, and broader cultural assumptions about men and women lie at the heart of women’s and gender studies. These departments seek answers about how individuals, families, and communities might flourish—and what forms of social life best serve the common good in relations between the sexes.

 

At this point, some readers may reasonably wonder whether what I have just described is how women’s and gender studies actually functions in practice. As the Catholic feminist scholar Abigail Favale has argued, much of the field operates within a broadly postmodern framework—one that treats reality as constructed through competing narratives rather than open to the possibility that, in some cases, there is simply an objective truth. As she puts it, postmodernism is “a worldview that sees reality in terms of narratives that are created by human beings, rather than the objective truths that can be discovered by human beings.” That concern is not without merit, and I agree with her that most women’s and gender studies work in academia is currently accomplished through a postmodern framework.

 

That said, in a women’s and gender studies classroom, not everyone is going to share my commitments as a Catholic feminist. And that’s okay—if the purpose of a liberal arts education is not to tell students what to think, but to form them in how to think, then our classrooms must be places where ideas are not simply affirmed, but tested. And this is true of any framework.

 

In my own courses, that means placing Favale alongside postmodernist Judith Butler, whose foundational book Gender Trouble completely changed contemporary conversations about gender, including the now-familiar and pervasive concept of gender as “performed.” Students may agree or disagree with either (or any other) idea, but in the best women’s and gender studies programs, no one perspective has a stranglehold. Ideally, a student would be able to figure out what type of feminist they are (or if they are a feminist at all). In the best classes, I’ve watched students change their minds mid-semester—and occasionally mid-sentence—because class discussions about gender have become so heated, and so fruitful.

 

If we do not study the history of these ideas, if we do not study Judith Butler, Abigail Favale, or Mary Wollstonecraft before here, we will not recognize these ideas when we encounter them in the present. The answer is not to remove women’s and gender studies courses, but to ensure they remain places where these ideas can be seriously engaged.

 

And so I pen this piece from Texas, where I have spent years leading a women’s and gender studies program committed—however imperfectly—to a kind of intellectual breadth that I hope galvanizes students to be thought leaders in how women and men can interact in this world at the highest levels. Yet, as you may already know, in recent years, higher education in Texas—and across much of the country beyond, too—has undergone significant political and institutional change. Public skepticism toward universities has grown, particularly along political lines, with declining trust in higher education shaping how these institutions are perceived and funded. In response, programs have been reduced, reorganized, or eliminated altogether.

 

This spring 2026, Texas A&M discontinued its women’s and gender studies program. Likewise, the University of Texas at Austin has folded its program into a broader “Social and Cultural Analysis” department. Similar patterns have emerged elsewhere, from Florida to North Carolina to Ohio and Kansas.

 

These developments reflect not only policy decisions, but also a growing uncertainty about what the university is for. A recent headline captured the mood rather neatly: “Move over, gender studies: the conservative tide coming for US universities.” That “tide” has taken the form of new programs centered on classical texts, civic education, and the “great books”—often framed as correctives to perceived ideological conformity within the humanities. And to be fair, that concern is not entirely unfounded.

 

But the response raises its own set of questions. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has noted, while concerns about ideological conformity may be valid, these new centers risk producing “the same kind of groupthink … just going in the other direction.” If that is the case, then the problem is not one side or the other. It is the loss of places where disagreement can be sustained without collapsing into camps. Where, then, are we able to have these conversations—where gender can be studied seriously, across differences—if not within programs designed to make that possible?

 

One striking feature of the current landscape is that many of the most sustained critiques of contemporary feminism are now emerging from outside women’s and gender studies programs. Consider, for instance, the writers associated with Fairer Disputations, a magazine that describes itself as advancing “sex-realist feminism”—one that insists on the reality of biological sex while allowing for “an array of perspectives on how society ought properly to accommodate that reality.”

 

Note that these are not fringe voices by any means. The writers, who include Dispatch contributing writer Leah Libresco Sargeant, author and journalist; Ivana Greco, a homeschooling mother and writer on family policy; and Abigail Favale (mentioned above) of the University of Notre Dame, tend to be very widely read. They make serious intellectual contributions to ongoing debates about embodiment, identity, and public life. And yet, much of their work circulates outside women’s and gender studies programs—often outside of academia altogether—rather than within them.

 

I find that difficult to ignore. Young women (and men, for that matter) need to encounter more than one model of feminism on their campuses—in the people who teach them and in the texts they read—so that they do not feel they must leave the academy in order to think one way, or remain within it to think another. Universities matter precisely because, at their best, they place competing ideas into sustained conversation rather than allowing students to remain within intellectual bubbles. An ideal classroom creates authentic encounters: between religious and secular frameworks, between liberal and conservative feminisms, between theory and lived experience. The goal is not ideological comfort, but intellectual formation. This is not a matter of “fixing” syllabi by eliminating programs, as some recent efforts have suggested, but of creating environments sizable enough to hold those distinctions in view—and to make possible the kind of intellectual freedom the liberal arts are meant to cultivate—to “liberate” our ideas, not bifurcate them (and ourselves) into only thinking certain thoughts in certain spaces.

 

Back to Miss Prim.

 

Miss Prim comes to her “awakening” slowly, prompted not by argument alone but by the insight of a friend who tells her, “If you reflected a little more deeply, you’d realize that you can only admire that which you do not possess. You do not admire in another a quality you have yourself; you admire what you don’t have and which you see shining in another in all its splendor.”

 

What women’s and gender studies programs seem to lack is an admiration for qualities outside the academy that could make it better. If the metaphor of Miss Prim holds, what is missing is something like a marriage; not the elimination of difference, but the recognition that what one does not possess may be worth engaging, perhaps even learning from. And I’d say that’s true for feminists working in and outside the academy.

 

This, at its best, is the work of a liberal arts education, and it is what we ought to offer our students, who deserve a place to contemplate the very difficult and complex ways gender intersects with their lives. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us, education is ultimately “for freedom”—not the freedom to remain within one’s own assumptions, but the freedom that comes from encountering ideas one does not already hold.

 

The goal of my classes is not to produce agreement or to create Catholic feminists who all think the same thing I do. Rather, it is to cultivate judgment—the kind that can live with disagreement and remain. And if women’s and gender studies is to survive—and to matter—it may need, like Miss Prim, to learn to admire what it does not yet possess.