By Barbara Howe
It’s been 25 years since the Women’s Studies Program began at West Virginia University—a quarter-century of challenges and successes. Women’s studies provides a liberal arts background for undergraduate and graduate students. The students learn to read critically, to write well, and to research issues of concern to today’s society. They also learn how to put their knowledge into action through service learning projects or organizations like FEM (Female Equality Movement), which sponsors the annual Take Back the Night event.
One of the famous comments in the history of the women’s suffrage movement is that the old feminists who started the movement at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 were no longer living by the time the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, and new feminists who saw that victory were not yet born in 1848. That analogy seems appropriate to women’s studies at WVU.
Traditional-age college seniors now graduating as women’s studies majors, minors, graduate certificate students, and master of arts in liberal studies students were not yet born when the WVU Women’s Studies Program began in 1980 under the direction of Dr. Judith Gold Stitzel. They grew up in a world where women’s studies was always available at WVU, where women were always members of the WVU marching band and always studied engineering and law and medicine and business, where there were no curfews for women living in residence halls. It’s easy to forget how many changes there have been, even as there is more to be done.
Through a network of over 100 faculty associates across the campus, women’s studies students take classes in departments as diverse as child development and family studies, community health promotion, English, foreign languages, geography, history, human nutrition and foods, psychology, resource management, sociology, and Spanish, among others. Dr. Ruth Kershner, an adjunct faculty member in women’s studies, led the effort to develop a graduate certificate in women’s health.
Center projects include sponsoring speakers and supporting service learning projects. For instance, students in a capstone seminar compiled materials about area resources for local Muslim women to help them learn more about Morgantown. The Center’s annual residency honors Judith Gold Stitzel, founding director of the WVU Women’s Studies Program. The 2005–06 resident will be Dr. Debra Rolison, head of the advanced electrochemicals section at the Naval Research Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Naval Research, who will be meeting with faculty and students in the sciences and engineering and presenting a public lecture on Title IX and academic science.
The Women’s Studies Program is also very much involved with the WVU Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center’s National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, which began in the fall of 2004. This is one of 21 such centers around the country. 
The goal is to improve the health of all West Virginia women through clinical care, research, outreach, professional education of health care providers, and leadership development for women in the health sciences. Faculty associates are involved in all aspects of this effort, and Dr. Barbara Howe, as director of the Center for Women’s Studies, is cochair of the outreach component with Dr. Elaine Bowen of the WVU Extension Service.
Dr. Lynda Ann Ewen, codirector of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia at Marshall University and a former member of our Women’s Studies Visiting Committee, once said “To all the women who have made, and are making, the WVU Women’s Studies Program a success, a heartfelt thank you! Women’s studies remains even more important now, in a time when the advances made by women are under political and moral attack. The gifts that women offer, the work that women do, and the insight that we possess, is desperately needed by our society. In Appalachia, this is even more so. Remember [the Chinese proverb] Women hold up half the sky.” 
