The advent of women's studies has brought a feminist perspective into the academy—but has it made a difference there? Has it transformed our curriculum; has it reshaped our materials; has it altered our knowledge?

In the essays collected here, nine distinguished scholars provide an overview of the differences the feminist perspective makes—and could make—in scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Carefully documented and judiciously critical, these essays inform the reader about developments in feminist scholarship in literary criticism, the performing arts, religion, history, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. The authors point out achievements of lasting value and indicate how these might become an integral part of the various disciplines.

Questions of female development shape women’s studies in many fields as women seek to define those forces which mold their experiences. Surprisingly, this is the first book to study systematically and from a comparative perspective the female novel of development, or Bildungsroman. Prevailing definitions of the Bildungsroman derive from the conceptions of development based on male experience. The book offers an expanded generic model that incorporates the distinctively female patterns of realization and failed realization which emerge from the limited social opportunities depicted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and from the particular features of women’s maturation as revealed by recent feminist psychoanalytic research.