This is an exciting time in the deliberations which may set up a Women's Studies Centre at Melbourne University, and I am glad to be able to contribute to them. What I want to spend most of my time talking about now are answers to the question, why have a Women's Studies Centre?

I would like to assume that, in 1987, it is no longer necessary to argue the prior question, why have Women's Studies at all? But I will pause over it for just a moment, because it is a question I am still called upon to answer from time to time at Adelaide University. Earlier this year, I was asked to give a seminar paper to the Botany Department on what Women's Studies is and does. Last year I had to perform a similar exercise for the Department of Plant Pathology at the Waite Institute of Agricultural Research. In both, it emerged that there was a previously formed expectation that Women's Studies must either be about ensuring more jobs for women in universities, or be concerned solely with — in their view — 'soft’ humanities waffle about representations of women in literature. On the first count, the Botany Department had hoped to demonstrate that there was no need for Women's Studies at Adelaide because they already employed several women —though, as usual, clustered in the lowest paid and least secure jobs. On the second, the Plant Pathologists simply could not believe that questions about gender could have anything to do with their research. One of them, who had listened to me talking about the masculinity of the work culture established in some laboratories and classrooms (to say nothing of industries) with care and, I think, no special lack of sympathy, finally said: