In 1860, the first women students entered the University
of Wisconsin in Madison, enrolled in a short-lived teacher-
training program. There were no women faculty or
administrators no women on the Board of Regents overseeing
the University, and no women enrolled in any other program or
department. By the late 1990s, the world of higher education for
women across the UW System had changed almost beyond recog-
nition, with women students outnumbering men, and women
serving not only on the faculty, but at the most senior levels of
administration. Students at every institution in the System could
take courses, and in some cases even major, in women's studies.
This book traces the process of that change, from the earliest
arguments over women's admission to the University through
their acceptance as students on equal terms with men, to the mid-
20th-century development of special programs for mature women
students, and finally, to the development, beginning in about
1970, of the new field of women's studies. As students, teachers,
administrators, and staff members, activists and scholars -or, in
some cases, all of those -the women described in this book have
been part of the movement that has insisted on their importance
as both learners and producers of knowledge.
This book is a collaborative project of the University of Wisconsin
System Women's Studies Consortium, founded in 1989.
The Consortium serves as the formal organization of the fourteen
campus-based Women's Studies programs and UW Extension.
(over image courtesy of the Helen Allen   ISBN 0-9658834-6-9
Textile ( ollection, School of Hunman Ecologyx,    9 0 0 0 0
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
(Cover photo by Greg Anderson.
( over design by Stephanie Stone.
9 780965 883467