In 1983 we are drawing close to the end of the ten years which the United Nations designated the Decade for Women. Halfway through that decade, in 1980, in Australia, the proportion of women in the population involved in some kind of post-secondary education had equalled the proportion of men. Only a year earlier it was possible to claim that ‘Women's studies courses are at present offered at most Australian universities'.

However, all the gains made by Women's Studies courses are affected by their relationships with the institutions in which they are offered. When funding, staffing, resources, requirements and procedures for enrolment and assessment are controlled by academic bureaucracies, the shape and nature of courses are inevitably affected by the attitudes of those bureaucracies. In general they have been, as Ann Curthoys observed in 1975, ‘essentially conservative’. ‘Universities’, she went on,

In a social formation whose government is prepared to concede equal pay for equal work in a gender-differentiated workforce, the universities follow suit by allowing Women's Studies courses to be established, but ensuring, or trying to ensure, that they are adequately contained within the established structure of the institution.

Courses which have conceded to the academic bureaucracies a broad conformity over enrolment and assessment requirements in return for their very existence can meet a far blunter containment.