Women's studies academics

Dr. Vina Mazumdar (28 March 1927 – 30 May 2013) was an Indian academic, left-wing activist and feminist. A pioneer in women's studies in India, she was a leading figure of the Indian women's movement. She was amongst the first women academics to combine activism with scholarly research in women's studies. She was secretary of the first Committee on the Status of Women in India that brought out the first report on the condition of women in the country, Towards Equality (1974). She was the founding Director of the Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS), an autonomous organisation established in 1980, under the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). She was a National Research Professor at the Centre for Women's Development Studies, Delhi.

Mary Daly (October 16, 1928 – January 3, 2010) was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes. She allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.

Dr. V. Mohini Giri (born 1938) is an Indian Community service worker and activist, who has been Chairperson of the Guild of Service, a New Delhi–based social service organization. Established in 1979, it provides advocacy for women's and children's rights for education, employment, and financial security. She founded War Widows Association, New Delhi in 1972. She has also remained Chairperson of the National Commission for Women (1995–1998).

Maria Mies (1931, Steffeln, Rhine Province, Prussia, Germany – 16 May 2023) was a German professor of sociology, Marxist feminist and author of several books, including: Indian Women and Patriarchy (1980), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986), Women: The Last Colony (with Bennholdt-Thomsen and von Werlhof, 1988), Ecofeminism (1993) together with Vandana Shiva, and The Subsistence Perspective together with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen. She was married to the eco-socialist Saral Sarkar.

Donna Laframboise is a Canadian investigative journalist, writer, and photographer. She has published critical reviews of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its reports for the United Nations.

Myra Dinnerstein (born 1934) was the founding director of the women's studies program at the University of Arizona. After completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate at Columbia University, she began teaching at the University of Arizona. In 1975, she started the women's studies program as an academic minor, and grew it into a full department with accredited undergraduate and master's degrees. She successfully fought an attempt to remove the program launched by the Arizona State Legislature because lesbian history and achievements were included in the curriculum. She retired in 2003 and was honored in 2005 the Women's Plaza of Honor.

Li Xiaojiang (李小江; 1951 – 12 February 2025) was a Chinese scholar of women's studies who was arguably the first to bring Women's Studies to importance in post-Mao China. One of China's leading feminist thinkers and writers, she was a professor at several colleges, as well as director of gender studies at Dalian University. As a young student, she started off at the Henan University studying Western Literature, until an encounter showed her how lacking women's studies scholarship was and caused her to change her major from Western Literature to Women's Studies. In 1983 her work Xiawa de Tansuo (In Search of Eve) was the catalyst for a surge of women's studies. She founded the first Women's Studies Research Centre and later a museum dedicated to women's cultural anthropology.

Ursula Masson (1945–2008), born Ursula O'Connor, was a Welsh academic and writer who worked closely with Jane Aaron and Honno Press/Gwasg Honno, the Welsh Women's Press, on the imprint Welsh Women's Classics – to bring back into print the works of forgotten Welsh women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Lotika Sarkar (4 January 1923 – 23 February 2013) was a noted Indian feminist, social worker, educator and lawyer, who was a pioneer in the field of women's studies and women's rights in India. She was a founding member of Centre for Women's Development Studies (CWDS), Delhi, established in 1980, and also Indian Association for Women Studies, established in 1982. Starting in 1951, she taught law at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi till 1983, and also remained the head of the Law Faculty, thereafter she taught at Indian Law Institute. She was the first Indian woman to graduate from Cambridge University, and later in 1951 she also became the first woman to receive a PhD degree in law from the university.

Irene Tinker (born March 8, 1927, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin), is professor emerita in the Departments of City and Regional Planning & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching from 1989 to 1998. She was the founding Board president of the International Center for Research on Women, founder and director of the Equity Policy Center and co-founder of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.