<p>OK, gussied.</p>
<p>There was no such thing as a Women’s Studies major when we were in college. If there had been, that’s what my wife would have done. Instead she double majored in Psychology (of women) and American Studies (women’s history). She graduated in the middle of a recession and hadn’t looked for a job before she did. She went through a series of temporary jobs, including saleswoman for a wholesale jeweler and collecting insurance and being a receptionist at a major hospital emergency room. She wound up working for a nonprofit housing developer, where she did a terrific job and ultimately was responsible for three successful projects. She went to law school, and was a Legal Services (poverty law) lawyer for about four years. During a maternity leave, she chaired the board of a group working on health policy, which led to her being offered (and accepting) a public health management job. Since then she has basically alternated between jobs in government – in her last one she managed an 11-figure budget and tens of thousands of employees – and jobs in the nonprofit sector, ranging from huge brand-name foundations to tiny advocacy organizations. She is a significant national expert in her field (which, by the way, is not unrelated to women’s studies), has shelves and shelves of awards and honors, and earns meaningfully more than the average senior civil engineer. While she thinks law school sharpened her analytic abilities, she hasn’t had a job for which her law degree was relevant in the past 22 years.</p>
<p>So, that’s one anecdote about what you can do with a women’s studies degree. Here are some other people close to me who had “useless” humanities majors: </p>
<p>One of my sisters was a Spanish Literature major; she manages a public mutual fund, earns a small fortune, and shows up on investment-oriented TV shows pretty regularly. She has no degrees other than her BA. My other sister was a History major and got an MA in Art History. She worked at a stock exchange for 10 years, ultimately in management, then went to a post-bac pre-med program (she hadn’t taken a science course since 10th grade), and is now an emergency medicine MD. And I have written here often about my friend the French Literature major and amateur musician who (with no other training) wound up as CEO of a company that manages scores of artists, mainly musicians. One of my college roommates was an Art History major; he is now a commercial real estate developer and manager with a pretty important art collection (although there was an MBA in there along the way).</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that there are hardly any college majors that specifically qualify someone for a particular job. Nursing, engineering, accounting, education, actuarial science . . . that’s about it. And even for them graduate study may be important for real career advancement. Everyone else is really trying to cash in their intelligence, work ethic, and analytic ability for on-the-job training and a chance to find a place in the world. Humanities majors aren’t “for fun”; if they are any good, they are a ton of work that constitute great preparation for meaningful employment in the real world.</p>
<p>EDIT: With all due respect, Hunt, Pizzagirl et al. are wrong about women’s studies and traditional women’s fields like teaching and, especially, nursing. Nursing schools are hotbeds of honest-to-god feminism. I know a number of women, both in my generation and in my children’s, who have gone into nursing as an outgrowth of their interest in feminism, and they have had / are having exciting, rewarding careers.</p>