About Overview
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan is an interdisciplinary program that explores gender and sexuality within the broader contexts of race, class, power, and culture. Drawing on faculty from across the University, the department brings together multiple disciplines to examine how social systems are shaped—and challenged—by these intersecting forces.
Students engage historical and contemporary questions through courses with wide geographic and thematic reach, spanning the United States and regions across Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, and South Asia. The department also fosters intellectual community through its annual symposia, the Diane Weiss Memorial Lecture, and department salons.
Graduates pursue paths in fields such as advocacy and activism, education, law and public policy, media and communications, human resources, social work, and nonprofit leadership—bringing critical insight and analytical skills to work that advances equity and positive social change.
Our History
The roots of Wesleyan’s Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program are deeply intertwined with the University’s history of coeducation, gender equity, and student-faculty activism.
Founded as a men’s college in 1831, Wesleyan first admitted women in 1872, reflecting its Methodist origins and a broader 19th-century movement toward coeducation. Influenced by Methodist commitments to educating men and women together—and by the growing women’s suffrage movement—Wesleyan became part of a regional reconsideration of gender and higher education. The University’s first women students—Jennie Larned, Phebe Almeda Stone, Angie Villette Warren, and Hannah Ada Taylor—were academically exceptional, graduating on time and with top honors despite the absence of campus housing and a largely unwelcoming climate.
From 1872 until 1892, women remained a tiny minority of the undergraduate community. In all only forty-three women were graduated between those years. While some male peers were supportive, institutional and cultural barriers were pervasive. The first decade of the twentieth century dealt coeducation its final blow. The lead cause was a decline in Wesleyan's overall admissions, which most blamed on fears that the school had become too feminized and might follow the sorry example of Boston University, where the undergraduate population was dominated by women. In 1909, the Board of Trustees formally ended the admission of women. Efforts to establish a women’s college within Wesleyan ultimately failed, though they contributed to the founding of Connecticut College for Women in 1915.
Women did not return to Wesleyan until 1968, when the University re-entered coeducation. That same year, faculty members—responding to the absence of courses addressing women’s status in society—began developing individual Women’s Studies courses. Throughout the 1970s, students and faculty worked together to formalize these efforts. A faculty committee formed in 1977, and by 1979—after sustained student organizing, research into peer institutions, and a faculty-approved proposal—Wesleyan officially established a Women’s Studies Program.
The program continued to grow, and in 1989, following the work of a Major Committee, Women’s Studies introduced its first major. The program flourished academically and intellectually, supported by a strong tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship and student engagement.
By the early 2000s, students and faculty began reassessing the scope and name of the program. A year-long student forum and a faculty seminar on Intersectionalities independently reached the same conclusion: while “Women’s Studies” had served an important purpose, it no longer fully captured the breadth of the program’s teaching, research, and student work. The name tended to suggest a unitary reading of the subjects of our scholarly work and could occlude important focal points that are an integral part of our curriculum and pedagogy, i.e. sexualities, including lesbian, bisexual, queer, and other radical sexualities; multiplicities of gender; the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity and other mutually constructed categories of social difference, and transnational dimensions of feminism, gender, and sexuality.
After several years of discussion, the program adopted the name Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies to reflect its evolved intellectual mission. In 2007, Wesleyan graduated the department’s first majors.
Today, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies stands as the product of more than a century of Wesleyan’s history — shaped by student and faculty inquiry and activism, and committed to rigorous, feminist, intersectional, and globally engaged scholarship.
