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If you'd like to enrich your women-centered education by participating in one of the nation's leading programs for the study of women gender, consider spending your Junior Year at Smith College.
Smith has been educating female leaders - and taking women's contributions seriously - for more than a century. Studying women and gender at a women's college means that you are at the center of the educational experience, being taken seriously as an intellectual and a feminist, and your courses give you both the theory and the practice to understand how gender operates in your own life and in the world beyond.
Curriculum and Community
Today Smith has one of the most extensive programs for the study of women and gender in the country. Our richly multicultural curriculum offers over 40 courses annually that focus on women's experience. At Smith you'll be part of a feminist intellectual community, taking SWG courses with 60 majors and many more interested students from all disciplines. Guiding you will be professors in 19 academic areas from Afro-American studies to theater.
Smith offers dozens of options in literature, the humanities, social sciences, biology and psychology and advanced electives on special topics such as sexuality, controversies in women's health and the Victorian parlor. Visiting students may elect up to four courses in the study of women and gender a semester.
One of America's finest women's history archives, The Sophia Smith Collection is housed at Smith and is free to all students. Many photographs used on our website are done so with the kind permission of the Smith College Archives, another excellent resource for students.
Beyond the Classroom
Smith's many feminist groups, formal and informal, will welcome you. These include the Feminists of Smith Unite, Prism: Queer Students of Color, Size Matters, Spectrum (lesbian, bisexual and transgender alliance), Tangent, VOX: Voices for Change, the Women's Resource Center; campus chapters of NOW and NARAL; and student task forces on breast cancer, rape awareness, child abuse, AIDS education and other health issues. Or you can do volunteer work off-campus through campus organizations like S.O.S. (Service Organizations of Smith). SWG students currently work at a battered women's shelter, a family planning center and in political causes.
Applying
If you have at least sophomore standing, a strong academic record and have completed at least two courses in the study of women and genedr, you are eligible for the Smith program. The final application deadline is July 1st for Fall admission (December 15 for mid-year admission), but you can apply any time before these deadlines under Smith's rolling admission program. We'll send you an answer within four weeks after we review your completed application.
What previous students in Junior Year in SWG have to say:
- “From my classes I learned to use race, class and gender as categories for the analysis of all spectrums of thinking. To view the world through the women's studies lens is to be critical, to question who has power, to look at my own power and its sources. It has given me the tools to create a framework for activism and has empowered me to take the initiative to achieve change.” -- Beth Bolyn
- “The major has given me a well-rounded liberal arts background. I have learned about traditional political theory and compared it to feminist theory; I have learned American History through the eyes of blacks and lesbians and gay men; I have read literature from the canon and compared it to writing by women and 'minorities'. I know I am prepared to handle just about any job I would want to have.”-- Darcy Wakefield
For more information about the Junior Year in the Progam for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith, please visit the Admission website.
Susan Van Dyne, Chair, Program for the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College,Northampton, MA 01063, (413) 585-3336.