About Women's and Gender Studies at St. Norbert College
Women’s and Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field which takes gender as a primary category of analysis and examines it using the insights of various disciplines from history to sociology to religion and beyond. As a result, students in the Women’s and Gender Studies minor will gain a rich understanding of gender as a social construction, one that intersects with class, race, age, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation and sexual identity.

Thus, Women’s and Gender Studies is both a content area (women and gender) and an approach, including pedagogies, methodologies and disciplinary questions specific to the field. Scholarship in the area for the last 30 years continues to be innovative and groundbreaking, particularly in its ability to use interdisciplinary knowledge to recover and examine exactly what gender means, both in a national and international context.

Women’s and Gender Studies supports the mission of St. Norbert College by “providing an educational environment that is intellectually, spiritually and personally challenging.” This discipline challenges the whole person through its innovative pedagogies, relevant theories and its importance in making sense of the world we encounter daily. 

Furthermore, we are called as a Catholic and Norbertine college to be particularly concerned with the promotion of social justice and human dignity, as mandated by the Gospels and Catholic social teaching. These concerns are integral to Women’s and Gender Studies which has always been sensitive to issues of social justice and creates a space for the voices of marginalized people to be heard both inside and outside the academy.

A Women’s and Gender studies minor has strong connections to the study of the liberal arts. A liberal arts education emphasizes critical thinking and writing, inter-disciplinarity and synthesis and the building of one’s ideas and arguments on firm cultural and historical foundations. The study of how gender has affected the construction of knowledge is therefore fundamental to a well-rounded liberal arts education.

Why study Women’s and Gender Studies?
Professions as varied as business, social work, medicine, law enforcement and education emphasize awareness of diversity as a key to professional success. By enhancing students’ ability to recognize and analyze the gendered structures that have shaped the lives of women and men of all races, classes, nationalities, religions, sexual orientation and abilities throughout history, Women’s and Gender Studies courses help students to develop what many modern professions identify as core competencies.

Today, few disciplines in the academy have been untouched by Women’s and Gender Studies theory and research. Because of this and the wide availability of undergraduateWomen’s and Gender Studies courses at most institutions of higher education, familiaritywith gender analyses and feminist theory is virtually taken for granted in graduate programs in the social and behavioral sciences and humanities. By providing systematicand focused curricular opportunities to learn the fundamental assumptions and approaches associated with the study of women and gender, Women’s and Gender Studies enhances the preparation of St. Norbert students for graduate study.  

Mission statement
Women's and Gender Studies supports:

• the liberal arts, emphasizing critical thinking and writing
• the mission of the College by affirming the whole person through its innovative pedagogies, relevant theories and its importance in making sense of the world we encounter daily
• concerns of social justice and human dignity

Women's and Gender Studies

Phone: (920) 403-3119
Fax: (920) 403-4086
E-mail: wmgs@snc.edu