Women's Studies is a field whose future seems perpetually up for question. People keep taking its temperature, wondering if this is the moment when it begins to show signs of decay. This uncertainty about the health and longevity of Women's Studies stems from the belief held by many, even by many of its most sincere proponents, that maybe this was all just a fad, a product of a political movement subject to its own eventual decline.

My own sense is that Women's Studies is actually made of sterner stuff. While it will certainly keep changing, as do all academic disciplines, I see no signs of an immanent demise. Colleagues in the publishing industry tell me that Women's Studies books are selling as well as ever. Indeed, recent trends suggest only that it is moving into areas of study where it had been previously absent. And observations about job hires, growth of degree programs, and enrollments, provide other signs of its continued health within the academy.

To understand some of the strength of Women's Studies, we need to differentiate between a political movement and its institutional accomplishments. The suffragist movement in the early twentieth century did not persist after the suffrage was won, but the vote for women did not then go away. One of the goals of the very active and flourishing feminist movement of the past thirty years has been to get people to recognize the importance of gender as an organizing category of social life. In the academy, this meant creating curriculum and programs where gender could be studied. If there appears any less energy in some quarters around struggles for this goal, this may be because there is a sense that less struggle is necessary. In many respects, Women's Studies has entered the mainstream. In disciplines such as history and literature, gender has become a well established subfield. It would be hard to conceptualize those disciplines today without this area of study. And even in disciplines where a focus on gender remains less central, as philosophy, it is still well institutionalized in conferences, journals, book series, and course offerings.

To say all this, is not to say, however, that the field is not changing. The history of feminist scholarship exhibits some moments when certain disciplines and debates played key roles in unifying the discipline. Anthropology played such a role in the 1970s as many began struggling with such questions as where did sexism come from and were there any unifying elements to it? Feminist philosophy and theory occupied a similar role in the 1990s as debates around the meaning of essentialism and the impact of postmodernism also generated much attention. As these last debates spin themselves out, we may be entering a period where there is no one discussion that brings many together. Instead, Women's Studies may be proceeding on its "slow march through the disciplines" extending awareness of the importance of gender in multifarious ways.

One other change that may be happening is a greater integration of a focus on gender with other categories of identity. My own present research focuses on the nature of identity as it manifests itself in a variety of categories. I see other feminist theorists similarly concerned with issues where gender is an important but not sole thread. Similar trends may be operating in other disciplines. As those working in Women's Studies have, on a theoretical level, come to recognize that gender never operates as a stand alone category, so our own research may be reflecting this awareness.

In sum, Women's Studies may be changing, but it does not seem about ready to die. While forecasting is a dangerous business, particularly when it is about the future of an area of academic research, my crystal ball indicates Women's Studies presence in the academy for the foreseeable future.

Professor Linda Nicholson normally teaches feminist theory and political philosophy at The State University of New York Albany but this year is a fellow at The Center for the Study of Values in Public Life of The Divinity School of Harvard. Her most recent book is , published by Cornell University Press (1999).

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