WOMEN'S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

 

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Subjects Covered:   The women's studies collection supports teaching and research conducted by faculty affiliated with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department.  The collection includes materials relating to gender expectation, gender identity, cultural constructions of gender, issues of gender equality, gender aspects of race and class, sex-based discrimination, sexuality, sexual orientation, pornography, feminism, and feminist theory.  Interdisciplinary material relating to women's place in society, the family, economics, politics, the law, and education are also included as are interdisciplinary studies of women's history, women in the sciences, women in the social sciences, and women in the arts.

Departments and Users Served:   The women's studies collection serves students and faculty in the undergraduate and graduate certificates of concentration in women's studies, in the two-year interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and in the joint degree program with the College of Law.  The collection also serves faculty and their students in the Evening and Continuing Education College and UC Blue Ash or UCBA College who are affiliated with the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Through direct patron borrowing the women's studies collection also serves faculty and students in women's studies within the OhioLINK system.

Other users within the University include faculty and students in all other departments and programs within the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as faculty and students in the College of Law, the College of Business Administration, the College Conservatory of Music, the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning, and the College of Education.  Faculty and students in the University's branch campuses also make use of the women's studies collection.  Limited use is made of the women's studies collection by faculty and students in the College of Nursing.

Quantitative Information:   http://ucaswww.mcm.uc.edu/womens_studies/

The Faculty :  Over 70 affiliated faculty members representing 30 departments throughout the University and its branch campuses offer over 100 courses each year in the interdisciplinary women's studies department.  In addition to the Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, two faculty members are situated within the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Bibliographer is an affiliated faculty member as well.

Faculty in the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and faculty affiliated with the women's studies department publish in the leading interdisciplinary women's studies journals and in the leading journals in their primary disciplines, in addition to their monographic publications and book reviews.  Faculty members affiliated with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department have won numerous awards for their publications.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty members have been awarded fellowships and grants from many institutes and foundations including Fulbright Programs, Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A detailed listing of affiliated faculty members, their areas of teaching and research, and their publications, honors, and awards may be found at http://ucaswww.mcm.uc.edu/womens_studies/faculty .

Each year Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies sponsors a distinguished scholar or author as the Center's Visiting Professor for one academic quarter to teach, direct research projects, and to lead community seminars. Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is actively pursuing an endowment for a faculty Chair in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies .

Degrees Granted:

Undergraduate:   The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department awards an interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate in women's studies.  The certificate in women's studies allows undergraduate students to build a foundation in feminist studies within their specific disciplinary major.

Graduate:   The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department offers three programs for graduate study.  The graduate certificate in women's studies is open to graduate students in any discipline and in any college at the University of Cincinnati. Like the undergraduate certificate, the graduate certificate in women's studies offers the opportunity to pursue feminist scholarship within a specific discipline or research area.

Women's studies also offers a Master of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a two-year program with a concentration in feminist theory, interdisciplinary studies in women's and gender issues, and research methodology.

The Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the College of Law offer a joint degree program.  The JD/MA, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is a four-year program that combines the traditional JD with academic work in women's studies centering on social aspects of the legal system and its impact on women.

For additional information about these three graduate programs offered through the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, see http://ucaswww.mcm.uc.edu/womens_studies/programs/ma.html or http://ucaswww.mcm.uc.edu/womens_studies/programs/jd.html .

Special Programs and Accreditation Requirements:   The Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offers instructional internships that allow students to earn academic credit for fieldwork experience in a number of approved community agencies that provide services to women.  Internships may also be approved for agency work in other states or abroad.  For additional information about the internship program in women's studies visit this web address:  http://ucaswww.mcm.uc.edu/womens_studies/programs/internships.html .

Grants and Special Funding:   The women's studies collection receives its funding from the library's general monographic and serial allocations.  Friends of Women's Studies has, on two occasions, made up deficits during monographic and serial cuts of the collection.  Friends of Women's Studies supports an active and ongoing library gift book program.  Friends of Women's Studies is actively engaged in raising a special library endowment.
 

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE COLLECTION

Location:   The women's studies collection is chiefly located in the Langsam Library.  Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies gift books have been placed in appropriate college and departmental libraries when the subject matter is more generally appropriate to a specific collection like the College Conservatory of Music or the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning.  Space considerations dictate that more of the older, little circulated monographs and discontinued serials are being moved to SWORD, the library's off site cooperative storage facility.

Other Collections Supporting the Program

Internal:   Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies draws on every disciplinary area within the library's collections although less so for Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematics.  The Classics Library maintains a strong collection of materials about women in classical antiquity and about women in modern Greece.  The College Conservatory of Music targets women in music as part of its collection development.  The College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning collects works about women as the subject of art and as artists and architects in their own right.  The College of Education supports the women's studies collection in areas dealing with feminist pedagogy and the education of girls and women.  The College of Business Administration collects material on women in management, women in advertising, and the glass ceiling. Within the College of Arts and Sciences women's studies is supported by the departments of Anthropology, English and Comparative Literatures, Philosophy, Economics, Romance Languages and Literatures, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Sociology, Psychology, and Geography.  The Asian Studies Program supports the women's studies collection by purchasing books about women in Asia.  The African American Studies Program supports the women's studies collection by purchasing books about African American women.  The School of Social Work supports those aspects of the women's studies collection that deal with issues and problems in serving the female client.

The College of Law, including its Urban Morgan Institute on Human Rights, supports the women's studies collection, especially in areas that intersect with the joint degree program between women's studies and law.

The women's studies collection also receives support from the media collection and from the Cohen collection, as well as support from the general social sciences and general humanities funds.

External:   Collections at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, especially their collection of women's fiction, support the women's studies collection.  Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion provides in depth information about women in Judaism.  Xavier University and the College of Mt. St. Joseph support that part of the women's studies collection dealing with women in religious orders.  Women's studies faculty and students also draw upon the combined collections in OhioLINK and research materials located at the Center for Research Libraries.

Collection History:   The Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, founded in 1974 to facilitate research and teaching about women and gender related issues at the University of Cincinnati, is among the earliest of such programs in the United States.  The Master of Arts degree, established in 1991, is one of the first four graduate programs in women's studies in the country.  In 1995 the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the College of Law pioneered a joint degree program, the JD/MA, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies designed to meet the interests and needs of students specializing in family law, human rights, sex-based discrimination, and civil liberties.

Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is a 400-member community organization founded in 1980 to support the programs, research, and teaching offered by the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Dues and income from the Friends endowment are used to support an annual visiting professor, to organize special lectures, and to provide for special events such as the yearly women's film festival.  Friends offers research and travel grants to students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Friends also supports the women's studies library collection through an ongoing library gift book program, and has made matching grants to the library to benefit the women's studies collection, the largest of which was a $6,000 matching grant made during fiscal year 1991-1992 that enabled the women's studies collection to off set in part the effect of the 50% budgetary cut to the collection levied the previous year.  Since then Friends has raised matching money to erase a serial deficit and has targeted an endowment for the library's women's studies collection in recent fund raising efforts.

General Level of Collecting:   Collection building using the budget allocation for women's studies is conducted at basic through advanced undergraduate and graduate.  However, areas of the women's studies collection that enjoy the added support of complimentary disciplines are collected at advanced undergraduate through research levels.
 

SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF THE COLLECTION

Call Numbers:  Treatment of women's issues may be found throughout the Library of Congress classification system.  As practiced at the University of Cincinnati the women's studies library budget is used chiefly for concentrated collecting in the HQ call number ranges.

HQ1-2039............The family. Marriage. Women

HQ12-449............Sexual life

HQ450-471.............Erotica

HQ503-1064...........The family. Marriage. Home
                                                                          Including child study, eugenics,
                                                                          Desertion, adultery, divorce,
                                                                          Polygamy, the aged

HQ1101-2030.7...........Women. Feminism. Women's clubs

HQ2035-2039............Life skills. Coping skills.  Everyday living
                                                                         skills

Bibliographic works about women or that touch on women's issues are also collected.  Such works generally fall within the Library of Congress Z call numbers.

Z5051-7999...............Subject bibliography

Z8000-8999...............Personal bibliography

Current and Retrospective Collecting:  The monographic allocation for women's studies does not permit active retrospective collection building.  Emphasis is placed on the acquisition of current monographic materials.  The women's studies collection benefits from the retrospective collection development of other disciplinary areas however, notably that done by history and English and, to a lesser degree, the Romance and Germanic languages.

Time Period Collected:   The women's studies collection contains works about women in all areas of recorded time, although greater emphasis is given to collecting material about women from the Medieval period to the present.

Levels and Treatments:   The women's studies collection contains works suitable for upper division students, graduate students, and faculty research.  Textbooks are infrequently collected, if at all.

Languages:   English is the primary language of the collection developed through the women's studies monographic allocation, although important books by French feminist theorists are sometimes purchased in the original as well as in translation.  Because of its interdisciplinary nature and the support that women's studies receives from other areas of the collection, the Romance and Germanic languages are well represented in the overall women's studies collection. Works in Greek are to be found in the Classics Library.

Geographical Areas:   The women's studies collection contains material representing many geographical areas including, but not limited to, the United States, Canada, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, India, China, and Japan.

Types of Resources:   The women's studies collection includes monographs, series, society publications, journals, atlases, indexes, abstracts, bibliographies, handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, government publications, and web sites.

Resource Formats:   The women's studies collection includes print, microform, video, and digital formats.  Print continues to be the predominant format.

Endowed Areas Supported by Restricted Funds:   The women's studies collection is not supported by any endowed or restricted funds.  However, Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies maintains an active gift book program that has contributed thousand of dollars worth of books to the collection over the years.  Friends is also seeking to raise a library endowment for the women's studies collection.
 

ACQUISITION PROCESS

Approval Plans:   The women's studies collection participates in the approval plan supplied by Yankee Book Peddler.

Firm Orders:   Firm orders for women's studies are selected from a variety of sources including vender notification slips, direct mail brochures, publisher catalogs, and book reviewing publications.

Standing Orders:   The women's studies collection maintains standing orders for journal publications.

Document Suppliers:   The women's studies collection relies heavily on direct patron access through OhioLINK and the Library's Interlibrary Loan Department for access to items that are not in our collection, are in circulation, or are missing from our collection.

Special Vendors:   The women's studies collection relies on the Acquisition Department to determine if a special vendor is needed to acquire requested materials.

Unique Source:   The women's studies collection draws on a number of important microfilm sources, including the History of Women collection that adds depth that the collection would not otherwise have, but these are not unique materials.
 

Sally Moffitt, Bibliographer
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
December 2000