Editor’s note: The following is the transcript of a speech (lightly edited for length and clarity) given by Bonnie Thornton Dill, former President of the National Women’s Studies Association, at the 2026 National Young Feminist Leadership Conference.
Good morning. Thank you all for being here and thank you Kathy, Ellie, and FMF for organizing this event.
So how many of you in the audience took a course on women and gender studies, Black studies or other ethnic studies in college? I’m expecting to see many hands go up.
And how many of you found that these courses changed the way you thought about or understood something important? Yes, right.
So have you ever thought about how those courses got here, got there, got into the curriculum? They were not in the curriculum when your grandmothers and I went to college. Maybe for some of your mothers. We are in danger of them not being there for your daughters. So I think it’s important to look back and remember how these departments, programs, majors and minors came about and see what lessons we can learn from the past to apply to the future. These programs were an outgrowth of social movements.
First, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the fights for Black, Latine, native, indigenous and Asian American rights. Ethnic studies programs were put in place because students demanded them. They walked out, they sat in, they went on strike and protested being given an education that ignored and erased their lives and their histories. As a result, the first African American studies program was established at San Francisco State University in 1968 and the first ethnic studies program at UC Berkeley in 1969.
Ancient history, I know for most of you.
These programs focused on teaching, researching and writing about the histories, cultures and struggles of communities that had historically been excluded or marginalized in academia. Agitation for women’s studies resulted in the first women’s studies program being established in 1970 at San Diego State University. Birthed through consciousness raising groups, rallies, petitions and other forms of activism, women’s studies became the academic arm of the feminist movement and has focused on studying and generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of women, queer and gender non-conforming people throughout the world.
Today’s ethnic and women and gender studies courses stand on the shoulders of those student strikes, feminist reading groups and coalitions that risked arrest and suspension to bring about these chapters, these changes. They are also indebted to groups that have fought to sustain them over the years in the face of budget cuts and reorganization designed to reduce and eliminate them.
Why has this been an ongoing struggle?
Efforts like this are likely to get targeted only if they are creating changes where people are learning to think about things in new ways, imagine different futures and challenge the existing hierarchies. You see, these programs have sought successfully to transform what knowledge counts, who gets to produce it and how it gets used in the world. Women’s and ethnic studies have documented how power and inequality work and have linked that research directly to social change, addressing gender discrimination, sexual harassment, racial inequity and shaping policies that protect students and workers. Students have learned that they are not passive recipients of this story, but potential authors of our story.
Beyond campuses, scholarship in these fields has influenced everything from domestic violence law to Title IX enforcement to debates over immigration, policing, reproductive justice and LGBTQ plus rights. In short, these programs have been one of the engines turning campus activism into broader movements for justice. And because these programs are powerful, they are under attack. Right now, we are living through a coordinated campaign to dismantle, eliminate and erase the very tools that help us name and challenge oppression.
We are witnessing a growing elimination of women’s studies programs at public universities. In January, Texas A&M announced that it would discontinue its bachelor’s degree and graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies, joining New College of Florida and the University of Iowa. In states with conservative legislatures, lawmakers have introduced bills to restrict or eliminate so-called DEI initiatives, banning discussions of race, gender and sexuality that they label ideological, and threatening funding for any program that dares to connect scholarship to social justice.
Second, use the tools these programs give us, research skills, historical knowledge, political analysis to tell a different story in public. That means write op-eds on campus, in campus and local papers, testify at board meetings, speak at rallies, and flood social media with narratives that connect these attacks to broader efforts to roll back voting rights, reproductive freedoms and LGBTQ+ protections.
Third, support the people on the front lines, faculty, staff and campus workers whose jobs and safety are at risk, join the National Women’s Studies Association, organize petition campaigns, and refuse to let people of color, women, queer and trans people carry this fight alone.
Fourth, connect campus fights to electoral power. When legislators are writing bills that target our program know their names, their donors, and their opponents, register classmates to vote, host-issue teach-ins that connect curriculum attacks to local elections and build sustainable student-run voter engagement teams. Feminist power at the polls looks like students turning out in local and state races that most people ignore because that is where school boards, regents, and lawmakers are decided.
Fifth, run for things yourself. Students who study these movements often become organizers and elected leaders. Feminist power in action is not just protesting outside the building, it’s also getting into the room where it happens, where curriculum, funding, and rights are decided.
And finally, care for each other. Organizing against coordinated attacks in the middle of so many overlapping crises is exhausting by design. How we fight matters as much as what we win. Build communities where rest, access, and safety are part of the strategy, not afterthoughts. Share resources and create spaces that protect the most vulnerable. Establish teams with multiple leaders who can take turns stepping forward to prevent burnout. The lesson of the past 50 years is that students can transform institutions and that every time you do, there will be a backlash. So you have to plan the transformation and prepare for the backlash.
Women’s, gender, and ethnic studies were born out of passion, commitment, conflict, and courage and they have already reshaped our universities and our politics. The questions facing us now is whether we will allow those gains to be quietly dismantled or whether we will meet this moment with the same fierce imagination as the students who came before. From campus to the polls, from the classroom to the streets, feminist power in action looks like you.
So what does it mean about who will be organizing? Us. Us, that’s right. Voting? Us. Running? Us. Teaching? Us. Protecting each other? Us. And refusing to be erased. Us.
So let’s honor the history we’ve inherited by making sure that 50 years from now, you can tell your children and grandchildren that when they came for our programs, we fought back and we won.