San Diego State's Women's Studies department was formed by students, staff, faculty, and community activists who saw the creation of the program as a natural academic outgrowth of the feminist and civil rights movements. During the 1960s and 1970s the idea of academic departments being created as academic arms of social movements and as a place were students can talk with faculty about shared experiences of oppression in academia was commonplace and Women's Studies was seen as a peer to other similar departments - Africana Studies (now often referred to as Black Studies), Chicana and Chicano Studies, and American Indian Studies.